The psychoanalyst and philosopher Jaques Lacan is often associated with the post-structuralist school of thought. However, in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) Slavoj Zizek distances Lacan from ‘the field of “post-structuralism”’ and writes against this ‘distorted picture of Lacan’s obscurantism’. Instead, Zizek locates him within the lineage of rationalism, envisaging him as ‘the most radical contemporary version of the Enlightenment’.[1] Zizek sees a new approach to ideology possible in a ‘return to Hegel’ through a Lacanian reading, which doesn’t fall into any kind of postmodernist ‘traps’, such as ‘the illusion that we live in a “post-ideological” condition’.[2] I thought it would be interesting to discuss the break from post-structuralism Zizek sees with Lacan in relation to The Matrix (1999).

In The Matrix, the ‘matrix’ is effectively an illusion designed to mask the ‘real’ state of the world; that the human race are actually slaves to a robotic superpower created as a product of unethical ecological destruction, and are (somewhat ironically) being harvested in fields for energy which the robots use to sustain themselves. The film has obvious Marxist points to make – that an abstract power (capitalism) is enslaving the human population for energy (money), keeping them in a powerless position by feeding them the illusion that they are in fact free – the matrix (bourgeois democracy), and tapping into millennial fears of global warming (in the matrix the humans ‘scorch’ the sky) and unchecked technological progress.

The matrix functions in some respects like an Althusserian ideology; from birth human beings are unknowingly interpellated, unable to understand the ‘real’ state of affairs, as their perception is intrinsically limited, being filtered through the matrix itself. The matrix is even shown to be ‘readable’ from the outside world like a language, as a stream of hieroglyphic symbols. This is in a sense (a somewhat simplified) post-structuralist view of language; that we live in a world of meaningless signs,[3] or words, which construct our version of reality, whilst having little or no connection to the way the world ‘really’ is. The language of the matrix is entirely anti-descriptive; it inscribes rather than describes. The post-structuralist theorist Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation even makes an appearance in the film (though Baudrillard stated that the film largely misunderstands his work).[4]

However, there are various problems with the way the matrix (ideology, language) is portrayed. From the start the protagonist Neo feels that there ‘is something missing’, that in the matrix things don’t seem to add up, and that the world in which he lives is somehow lacking. He begins to live a ‘double life’, by day he works in an office, and by night is a computer-hacker, essentially turning the language of the matrix against itself, in order to find the truth of things (the matrix is envisioned as a futuristic encryption program). The fact that Neo already feels there is something amiss however, implies that this sense of lack is somehow already part of the matrix, that there is a way out already built in to the very language of the matrix. Why is the matrix constructed in such a way that it is possible for people to feel something is missing, and to imagine that the matrix is an illusion?

This is variously explained as a mistake on the part of the robots, who are unable to fully grasp the very human requirements which would make the matrix entirely convincing. And of course, Neo is also ‘the chosen one’ (though he is at the start positioned as an ordinary everyman in order that we as an audience identify with his journey to disillusionment) and is therefore the singular genius who has somehow been endowed with the superpowers which allow him to see beyond the illusion, the world of meaningless signs, and is even able to manipulate the matrix itself in the later movies.

The film generally encourages a cynical perspective of reality, whilst offering some straightforward answers to very difficult and vague questions such as ‘why do I feel that something is lacking from reality?’ This sense of lack is manipulated for the Marxist environmentalist message the film wishes to promulgate, addressing the audience thus: ‘you too feel that there is something wrong, some truth which has been concealed from you’ and that ‘this is because in reality you are a slave to capitalism, you are being exploited and lied to, whilst the environment is being destroyed in your name’. The underlying message of the film is to mistrust modern notions of progress, desiring a return to a simpler, pre-capitalist, ‘golden age’ where humans live in harmony with nature.

The film also offers a ‘safe space’ (an outside to the matrix), a position of distance from which ideologies can be critiqued without prejudice, which seems to be at odds with the post-structuralist elements of the movie. That there is ‘no meta-language’ (an unprejudiced ‘safe’ language with which one can critique other languages) is a commonplace post-structuralist assertion.[5] In post-structuralism the classic opposition between text (the matrix) and its external reading is replaced by one continuous literary text, an infinite intertextuality of which any interpretation is automatically already part of the process (there is no escape from the matrix, nowhere outside the system). The Matrix, from a post-structuralist perspective, falls into the error of attempting to give clear definition to the ‘real’ world, a world beyond the matrix and free of illusions.

In post-structuralist writing, any truth-claim (an attempt to reveal the real world, the true meaning behind the illusion) is deliberately avoided, preferring to reveal the mechanisms which construct a ‘truth’ themselves, and by constantly pointing to the illusory nature of language, which can never say what it ‘really’ means.  However, as Zizek writes:

‘The position from which the deconstructivist can always make sure of the fact that “there is no metalanguage”, that no utterance can say precisely what it intended to say, that the process of enunciation always subverts the utterance, is the position of metalanguage in its purest, most radical form […] That is why post-structualist poeticism is ultimately affected. The whole effort to write ‘poetically’, to make us feel how our own text is already caught in a decentered network of plural processes and how this textual process always subverts what we “intended to say” […] is a clearly defined theoretical position which can be articulated without difficulty in a pure and simple metalanguage.’[6]

There is a third version of reality which The Matrix is in dialogue with; that of the audience, our own version of reality. The film reflects our reality back to us as the matrix, an illusion, revealing the effects of our own interpellation, the way reality is constructed through language, and positions the audience in a space that allows criticism of such ideologies. Is this not the post-structuralist agenda at its most basic, as Zizek writes, to ‘expose the textual mechanisms producing the truth effect’?[7]

The post-structuralist assertion that ‘there is no metalanguage’, according to Zizek, should actually be taken as ‘there is no object-language’ – that there is no transparent means of describing reality (the object) through language. Whereas in Lacan’s teaching, Zizek explains:

‘the proposition “there is no metalanguage” is to be taken literally. It means that all language is in a way an object-language: there is no language without object. Even when the language is apparently caught in a self-referential movement, even when it is apparently speaking about only itself, there is an objective, non-signifying ‘reference’ to this movement. The Lacanian mark is, of course, the objet petit a. The self-referential movement of the signifier is not that of a closed circle, but an elliptical movement around a certain void. And the objet petit a, as the original lost object which in a way coincides with its own loss, is precisely the embodiment of this void.’[8]

The post-structuralist view, therefore, doesn’t account for the way in which the position of metalanguage, a ‘safe-space’, is implied through language itself. Lacanian theory, on the contrary, envisions the flaw of language, the implication that something is ‘beyond’, that something ‘real’ is missing, as in-built and paradoxically, a condition of language – although this real is always fundamentally unattainable in a positive sense. As Zizek writes, ‘the mask is not simply hiding the real state of things; the ideological distortion is written into its very essence.’[9]

The Lacanian Real is a void, an absence, around which all language is structured and yet is impossible to adequately describe. In this way the Real can only be signaled negatively, as a lack. It is perhaps no coincidence then, that the city in the world outside the matrix is named ‘Zion’ (in Judaism often synonymous with Jerusalem, but within the Rastafarian movement represents a utopian place of unity or heaven), an embodiment of all that reality seems to lack. In this way fantasies – such as the utopian ‘real world’ of The Matrix – become necessary illusions; they prop up our version of reality, by filling in these holes, these absences of meaning in the symbolic order, mitigating the trauma of the Real, and in this process become sublime; the ‘sublime object of ideology’.

– Jack Thurland, 2nd Year Literature student