' Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. ...try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy:There's no spoon.'
Matrix, 1999.
In 1981 Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher of the Post-modern experience, introduced his revolutionary thesis of 'Simulacra and Simulation' to an awestruck community of academics who were still coming to terms with the emergence of an aesthetic and a way of life that was fragmentary, synthetic, subjective and vulnerable to skeptical deconstruction, revealing at its centre a hole, a lack of objective truth that had sanctified knowledge since the great revolution of ideas, known as the Enlightenment.
He proposed an epistemological model to explain the relation between symbols and society and the limits imposed on the human mind's ability to access 'truth', by the historical evolution of that critical relationship. He also shows us, in the process, how the Enlightenment paradigm,
God= Light= Reason/ Truth } Logos
is radically and irreversibly altered. Baudrillard characterizes experience in the mediatized, virtualized, post-capitalistic reality as governed by an infinite sequence of images that endlessly refer back to each other for meaning, with no objective truth to reveal at the end of the process.
In 1999, the fiendishly creative Wachowskis introduced a popular-cinematic spin to this hardcore academic idea, and got it cross-fertilized with the emerging discourses of software programming and A.I. The resulting text is a hybrid of science fiction and cultural critique-- the cult cyberpunk classic, Matrix.
The whole idea of inhabiting a simulated reality where consciousness is controlled by the 'hyperreal', may have been pretty darkly futuristic, the stuff of millennial dystopia in 1999, but in less than twenty years of its release, it isn't anymore. As the debate rages over the ethicality of autonomous weapons in warfare, the future looks increasingly inclement where full robotization of military conflicts can be a lot sooner than we may expect. Mark Zuckerberg, the poster-boy of prodigiac innovation, is a well-known critic of this kind of dehumanization of the scientific imagination.
We live, pretty much like in Baudrillard's Third, or even Fourth Order Simulation where reality is constructed by signs and images for us, but these signs represent no original truth. ''The simulacrum (copy) is never that which conceals the truth-- it is the truth which conceals that there is none. [Only] the simulacrum is true.'' The images, the discourses, the meanings that compete for legitimacy all day, non stop, on television, internet, social media, in print, advertising, and cinema construct realities that are so shifting, so provisional, so ideologically motivated, and ultimately so self-reflexive that they have to deliberately blur the contours of a truth that exceeds, and exists outside, their purpose and existence. Like the hyperreal currency 'Bitcoin', these images create values for us that are finally, empty; non- existent.
'Post-truth' and 'Alternative Facts' are the new symbolic tools by which power is asserted and maintained. But it is a world of signifiers without a referent. A stream of representation without the 'real' that validates the enterprise. Let's say, we see a city in Iraq or Ukraine being bombed, on the internet or on television; we know that pictures don't lie, right? So we are lulled into a ready and unquestioning credulity, without asking who shows us the images. Does it matter? We know that pictures don't lie.So if the pictures are true, the accompanying commentary, or information must be authentic too. At least, the presumption seems to be that there is an effort to unearth the 'truth' behind the incident. But depending on who controls representation, the interpretation of the image assumes a 180 degree flexibility; there is no objective, universal ideal of truth anymore--existing outside the symbols of power-- that says: 'killing humans for ideology isn't ethically feasible, and that whatever happens, human life is inviolable.'
Till the end of World War II there was no such skepticism or relativist confusion surrounding the accountability and morality of war. If the bombing of Pearl Harbor was unethical, so was Hiroshima, and there was a fairly unambiguous boundary of responsibility. No one in their right mind would even suggest, ''well, you know, with a little bit of tweaking of the image and the information you disseminate, and if you do influence the opinion of a fairly large number of people, you can actually make the world believe that Hiroshima did not happen! Or even if it did, let's say it's India that did it.' Today, after the death of truth, this is exactly what is possible and is done.
During the First Gulf War of 1989, we, for the first time, felt the power of images to shape the outcome of a military conflict. It was the first major technologically enabled war,engaging a western superpower after the World War II, that was televised for the world to view as a spectacle. Whoever had the power over representation and semiotics of war, we knew, would win it. We knew that the U.S would finally have the edge since the American images of precision bombing of the Iraqi territory were breathtakingly efficient.
Ironically, within the space of a decade, the enemy hijacked this weapon and started disseminating propaganda images across the virtual world setting the Western notion of liberal democracy--an enduring legacy of the French Revolution and Enlightenment--on fire. It harvested its recruits from among the unemployed/ socially alienated white/ coloured youth in ways that was beyond the inkling of the most sophisticated surveillance machinery.
The result was 9/11. Again, an image indelibly burned in the memory of a global population. And this too created a semiotic mythology of its own, becoming a potent visual ammunition for both the liberal West and radical Islam. The melting, falling Twin Towers, going up in flames that were infernal... whose image is it? What does is mean?
The wrath of fundamentalist Islam?
The apocalyptic resurgence of secular democracy?
The liberal West rising from the ashes of spectacular, extra-territorial terror?
The collapse of capitalistic arrogance, consumerist decadence?
The slaughter of the innocent?
The fulfillment of the prophecy of the Second Coming?
No single, definitive discourse can close the endless chain of semiotic significations any more, devoid of all intrinsic value, this play of incessant interpretations is impossible to arrest because there is no truth outside the system that would close the interpretation and give it its ultimate meaning.
Only the ones who control representation know this...that there is no truth. There is no spoon.
Every election that is virtually rigged, every social media clip that mobilizes your polarized anger against a cultural/ racial/ religious Other, is a confirmation of this 'Virtual Irreality' (Pater Sparrow), this hyperreal existence without Truth. We are so irreversibly plugged into the programme that we can not recognize its contrived nature.
This is the new way that power tries to neutralize dissent; keeps skepticism at bay and contains dissidence: by manufacturing realities at its convenience. Every person in authority knows and understands the efficacy of this tool.
The Fascist propaganda was but a trial run of this massive, pervasive and inescapable epistemic manipulation.
So where does the control end? Is there no way to break on through to the other side? Is there no refuge--the 'Zion'--of awareness and resistance? Is there no way to subvert the control that engulfs experience, sucking the air of truth out of it?
There is. And the answer lies in the old fashioned word, 'choice', made fashionable by the Existentialists, such as Sartre and his legendary girlfriend.
Choice is the only weapon of consciousness against the random anarchy of experience. This option is as old as the first martyr to reason and truth that humanity knew: Socrates.
When a cynical and coldblooded Agent Smith, poised on world dominance, exasperatedly asks his adversary Neo, about his resistance, the power of choice becomes apparent:
'Why Mr. Anderson? Why, why? Why.. get up? Why keep fighting?... Is it freedom? ...Truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be love?...Illusions...Vagaries of perception... Why do you persist?' A pallid, broken -down and Christic Neo replies with a cool resolve, 'because I choose to' which confuses the cyberdevil as he can not make sense of the human consciousness justifying its meaning and purpose through choice.
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| Jean Paul Sartre and his legendary girlfriend Beauvoir were ardent proponents of Existential Choice, in their writing as well as in their lives lived most unconventionally as ethical experiments. |
So the next time authority tries to bully you, overwhelm you, armtwist you into submission and consent, just go along, play along, give in...but never forget to wink at the surveillance camera before you do; give your oppressor a once-over before you nod; look through them before you capitulate; curl your lips in disdain as you say 'yes'. They will falter without knowing why.
They'll know that you know.
You know that there is no spoon.
