Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Although popularly associated with postmodernism, the idea that the world is a representation goes back to the origins of western thought. In Plato's allegory of the cave, it is said that we cannot see the truth but only a reflection of it. In Descartes’ hypothesis of the Evil Demon, it is argued that all we know is merely an illusion produced by another, alien intelligence. And after Descartes there are a variety of philosophical Idealisms, in which it is claimed that the world comes about only as an effect of our will or that the world exists only insofar as it is perceived. In postmodernism, however, these essentially metaphysical speculations are seen to be socially embodied through such mass media as the movies, television, advertising, and the Internet. Thus, a film like the Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix is understood at once as a revival of the old Platonic fantasy and a powerful metaphor for our contemporary society of the spectacle. Indeed, in the now-celebrated catchphrase of the film, uttered by the leader of the resistance, Morpheus, to the newcomer, Neo, “Welcome to the desert of the real,” the filmmakers even acknowledge the prominent postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard and his theory of simulation, which is often taken for an argument that the world has become its own representation. However, as revealed by his own repeated distancing of himself from the film, ... log in or subscribe to read full text