This blog first saw the light of day many years ago, in an enthusiastic effort to analyze the Matrix trilogy of movies by referencing Karl Marx’s writings and critique of capitalist social relations. That analysis turned out to be so germane, it allowed me to see so much more and so much more clearly into the movies and their detailed and complex narrative, that it laid the first brick of a process whereby I’ve come to see much of the world around me, and not just the movies, as a Marxian matrix.
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Aufhebung & Cynicism: Taxi Driver and the Morality of Emancipation
This post began as a reflection on Taxi Driver, then took on a greater scale.
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Take a moment and think about this word: cynical. It seems to me the longer you think about it, the less clear your idea about its meaning. What is a cynic? How exactly would you describe the state of mind of someone being cynical? Is it about having a negative outlook on life, about looking for elements to critique, about highlighting the shortcomings and exacerbating them, and so on? But if everything is negative, why bother critiquing it or highlighting its shortcoming?.. It seems somewhat counter-productive or… contradictory.
It also sounds weirder the more you say it: “cynical”. Thankfully, the explanation for that is more straightforward: the word comes for the Greek word Κυνόσαργες (Kunósarges), first home of the Cynic school of philosophy in Athens. A well-known rep of that school is Diogenes, whose famous stories include using a lamp in daylight “looking for a man” (Wikipedia explains that “In his view, the unreasoning behavior of the people around him meant that they did not qualify as men”) and his meeting with Alexander the Great.
Story goes that Alexander had a very good opinion of himself and considered himself powerful, and while visiting Corinth (Diogenes had been captured by slavers and transported there) wanted to visit Diogenes who had a reputation for his very unusual way of life. Alexander found him and…
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8½, Fellini The Uncompromising
What is a compromise and how should one go about it? To compromise: a question of morality, practicality, of vanity and pride? Without a doubt, we have all been faced with the possibility – or pressure – to compromise.
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From Revolutions to Resurrections: A Prediction on the Matrix 4
After seeing the latest Matrix 4 trailer that begins with “We’re all caught in these strange repeating loops”, I was struck by the fear that the latest entry in this movie series would follow the current trend of “time paradox” science-fiction movies: I’m thinking of the Interstellars, Arrivals and Dunes of recent times. All of these suffer from a brilliant premise that peters out into a “it couldn’t have happened any other way” scenario.
Could the Matrix 4 also fall into this cliché and, more importantly, would that go against what the movies have until now achieved? To answer this question, I will first look at Interstellar, Arrival and Dune as symptoms of contemporary science-fiction cinema; I will also complement this with a small commentary on Westworld and I will finally summarize the findings of my previous analysis of the trilogy. In doing so, I hope to give myself and others interested in the Matrix 4 a Marxian-inspired guideline for when the movie comes out next week.
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Chapter 1: The Commodity
After our study of the Matrix trilogy, we outlined a plan on how to approach Marx’s behemoth, Capital. After our study of the Soviet system, we argued why the study of Marx’s crowning work might be particularly interesting, especially concerning the relation between democracy and exploitation.
Today, we take a look at Chapter 1 (except the fetishism sub-section) and try to faithfully summarize its contents. Our challenge is to do it under the 1000-word mark. Here we go.
Thomas Piketty, Revenant of Feuerbach?
I am in the process of going through Piketty’s newest book, Capital and Ideology. While I am very admiring of Piketty’s decision to refuse the Legion of Honour, there is a profound contradiction between the data that Piketty presents in his two books and their implicit implications, and the explicit meaning he himself has given to the data. Were we living in a kind of censorship like the one attributed to Eastern European communism, I would simply assume that it is a stratagem to outplay the censors; fortunately or not, we are not in that situation, which begs the question: why would the title and data of both books be implicitly reminiscent of Marx’s own work (Capital), yet reject so explicitly the basic tenets of Marxian theory?
The Fall of the Berlin Wall and of the GDR, 30 Years Later: What to Celebrate?
Credits: Encyclopaedia Britannica.
That’s the Berlin Wall, on November 10th, 1989. A day before, the East German government had announced, in an infamous press conference, that all Eastern citizens were to be granted passage towards the West, effective immediately. This caused quite a commotion in both East and West Berlin, and eventually, soldiers at the checkpoints gave in and the crowds could move as they pleased.
The Spectre of Contradiction
Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.
RECAP: As we approach the opening of the (iron?) curtain to Marx’s Capital, we will set the stage by touching upon the work of those that Marx refers to in his magnum opus. Not only should excerpts of related thinkers help show how Capital is expected to be a step up from these, but they should also give a clue as to the power of Capital in highlighting with awesome lucidity the problematic nature of today’s capitalist social relations.
Today, we get closer to the examination of Marx’s Capital because, until now, we’ve presented elements of decor which were rather static: beginning with the worker’s desire, we zoomed out from his psyche and considered the existence of his “human nature”, then zoomed out once again until we saw chains binding him to the figure of the capitalist. In this post, we consider the dynamism of the relation between these two actors, with the help of Johann Heinrich von Thünen (1783-1850):
The Ethics of Golden Shackles
Credits: sallyedelsteincollage.com
RECAP: As we approach the opening of the (iron?) curtain to Marx’s Capital, we will set the stage by touching upon the work of those that Marx refers to in his magnum opus. Not only should excerpts of related thinkers help show how Capital is expected to be a step up from these, but they should also give a clue as to the power of Capital in highlighting with awesome lucidity the problematic nature of today’s capitalist social relations.
Having first focussed on the importance of desire in the status of the working class, we then touched upon the notion that, because of human nature, workers would be comfortable in being dependent upon capitalists for their subsistence. Today, I want to come back to this notion of golden shackles, as it is described by Marx himself:
Does Capital Feed off of Human Nature?
By Georg Scholz. Source: Wikipedia.
RECAP: As we approach the opening of the (iron?) curtain to Marx’s Capital, we will set the stage by touching upon the work of those that Marx refers to in his magnum opus. Not only should excerpts of related thinkers help show how Capital is expected to be a step up from these, but they should also give a clue as to the power of Capital in highlighting with awesome lucidity the problematic nature of today’s capitalist social relations.
We first presented the status of the worker, focussing on the notion of desire and the role it plays in making a “good society”. In our second element of decor, F.M. Eden curtly describes human nature and gives some advice:
The Marxian Matrix 