Semiotic take
“Specific semiotic systems are all codes”, Daniel Chandler argues. Now codes, in present analysis, is a very useful term when applying semiotics to a work, or “text”, as Derrida would have it, as the motion picture The Matrix. Analyzing this film, one may very well make use of semiotic theory to make sense of a text of hidden signification – that is, a text in which the “discovered”[1] signs function as meaning bearers – but I find it all the more enriching to consider the film actually operating on a kind of meta-semiotic level; according to this interpretation it indeed has something to say about how people live by (or in) conceptual sign systems they actually themselves have created.
To start with, when taking such a “constructivist” stand, some important things need to be clarified. Between claiming that all signs are absolutely arbitrary and to say that there are indeed a natural, inherent order independent of human constructs (i.e., something more than just the Kantian notion of the imperceptible but transcendental thing-in-it-self), one would find oneself in a position in-between. But this need not be any anarchic or to some greater extent relativistic position. A better way to look at it is trying to grasp the so-called location problem, discussed by Lamarque and Olsen in Metaphorical Truth. As a fairly common type of sign, the metaphor is here scrutinized in terms of where its meaning (and potential ‘truth’) derives from, since there has been much debate on this issue which for the sake of simplicity may seen as a conflict between a subjectivist stand and an objectivist one. What the authors of the text aim at is to offer a sort of experimentalist account for the meaning of both metaphor and literary works in general, which consists in an emphasis on an ongoing negotiation between text and reader; it should be viewed as more of an exploration than an explication, a process rather than finding a final meaning. The emphasis lies in a balance between what they call context-specific aims and constitutive aims of metaphor, where the former invokes in the hearer or reader this process – a process partly of an intellectual kind, which is consistent with Peirce’s notion of semiosis – of imagination and analogical thinking, whereas the latter stresses the context in which the metaphor appears as crucial for any meaning or ‘truth’ to appear.
Lakoff also focuses on the metaphor in his philosophical study of everyday language, claiming that metaphor is basically functioning on a fundamental level not only in our language, which he points out is something often unnoticed, but also in our conceptual systems as well. In short, we think, speak and act metaphorically. Although resembling a kind of metanarrative in the holistic style of Mircea Eliade or Lotman, Lakoff is partly convincing in showing how our metaphorical concepts of space and time are systematically coherent with their physical and cultural basis. Thus, according to Lakoff, metaphors are not arbitrary and seen as a sign of iconicity, it indeed has some “naturalness” to it.
So exploring the world of signs and their connection with “reality”, some theorists are eager to show where these may be found, but an important issue here is to be attentive to where these may not be found. Lakoff indeed shows us how an inspiring metaphor is so because of its highlighting features, whereas those features being suppressed or masked makes one forget the less inspiring or positive aspect of the concept in the metaphor. Thus, the appropriateness of a metaphor, according to Lakoff, is largely determined by e.g. their sanctioning actions which are culturally and historically established as “good”, which could be said to be the learning of a dominant connotation. This takes us to an important issue in this analysis, namely that of ideology.
The notion of denotation is in its basic idea that it is something “literal”, something that Erwin Panofsky thought, at least in the case of pictures, would be recognizable to all viewers from any culture at any time; without some kind of ambiguity in this statement, it would mean something quite absurd. That fact that history and variations in different cultures have effect on what something means to us is hardly something one would neglect, even though focus sometimes, as with Saussure, is put on the synchronic model. One would have to specify what sort of semiotic system it is that carries meaning, and to whom and when this might be the case. When the system is one of art or one with existential overtones, such a thing as a denotation, as an “obvious” meaning, becomes somewhat more troublesome than in the case of linguistic denotation, where entries in dictionaries are changed over time (such an example is the way Swedish culture the last decades have contributed to changes in SAOL).
But it would be complacent to think of linguistic systems as that much different than cultural or social systems, because, from a philosophical point of view – and this is something that Lamarque and Olsen are clear on – people tend to forget that we live, act and speak through language; language is present all the time, and changes made within language will affect the way we perceive things outside language and vice versa. It might be the case that even such a notion is not sufficient; since language pervades everything, and since self-awareness would not be possible without it, distinctions between linguistic and extra-linguistic spheres are easily blurred. The faster our culture, and with it, language, evolves, the less intact the boundaries will seem.
Barthes realized the problems with denotation and connotation in culture, and was eventually to conclude that there are only chains of connotation, although connotation will at some point, in some cultural sphere pretend to be denotation, powered by ideological forces. Thus, the semioticians critical of Saussure’s model, found that it is incompatible with structures in “real” life, i.e., with the social and cultural aspect of it, since here value is always to be taken into account when interpreting signs. For analytical reasons, however, structural analysis may help to make sense of our lives as social beings, but when signs are tending to merely produce more signs, without any clear references, a “first” denotation could be impossible to find.
Like Barthes, Derrida realized this, and criticizing Saussure for prioritizing the spoken word over the written text, he tries to show that finding any “first”, “natural” or “primal” origin is a hopeless business. He calls it the trace, and shows that it is something of a logical error to establish something originary, just as it is futile to reach any absolute, final stage in processes. It is, however, something that seems inherent in our minds, searching for this “first” or “last”, due to linear thinking and for other existential reasons, but which is nevertheless more of a dead end than something helpful. Derrida says that the “trace” is untraceable as such, because of its already split character, and rather wants to view everything as becoming-sign.[2] The crucial thing to bear in mind is difference. As Anthony Wilden says, “no two categories and no two kinds of experience are more fundamental in human life and thought than continuity and discontinuity”.
Thus, the case has much to do with a need to fix certain states in human life, or as Derrida says, to resist play, in order to make more sense of them; structural systems has obviously been one of the attempts in doing so, even though to fix categories of signifiers and signifieds, denotations and connotations, boundaries or any kind of distinguishing of signs is, as Coward and Ellis agree, apparently something not in line with the Heraclitan doctrine of everything being in a perpetual flux. Yet ideology, especially in present day, seems to maintain just such fixity, where culture has become nature and temporality has vanished; in short, any distinctions or mediated binary oppositions seem to have gone lost.
As culture mirroring its own current state, the film The Matrix (1999) explores a speculative future state of things to come, taken that signs continue to eradicate the distinctions between reality and the sign interpreters. Like Chandler says, “Signs and codes are generated by myths and in turn serve to maintain them. […] Their function is to naturalize the cultural – in other words, to make dominant cultural and historical values, attitudes and beliefs seem entirely ‘natural’, ‘normal’, self-evident, timeless, obvious ‘common-sense” – and thus objective and ‘true’ reflections of ‘the way things are”. This is clearly what is going on in the world depicted in The Matrix, where our own power of ideology – a power that hides the ideological function of signs and codes, which is to maintain certain power structures – has turned against ourselves. “The way things are” is a state which avoids the need to be deciphered, but in The Matrix, a few “semioticians” have managed to escape the suppressing powers of ideology, and are able to do just such a thing as decipher the code of “reality”, which is depicted as actual code, thus making use of the slight shift in meaning (or rather connotation) the word has gone through.
The film seems to play with the semiotic analysis at both a literal and a metaphorical level, depicting a world where binary-code-based machines make use of their own building blocks, to turn them against those who created the machines by those very means. As human beings favoring analogy over digital modes, the machines make use of this to impose the more discrete and fixing digital code on us. The metaphorical aspect of the film, is that this may as well be viewed as an allegory of what is already going on between people, on different cultural and social levels, where the structures are based on power, but which are now subtler than ever and therefore invisible. What once existed as an opposition between analogical and digital signs, has now been reduced to a pure digital landscape, where “reality” therefore cannot be distinguished from fiction; connotations have clustered and mixed together, and any denotation allowing for “reality” to emerge is now impossible.
Thus, the very system Saussure made famous, once meant to make sense of our language and our surroundings, has now trapped us within it. Again, it is as much of a metaphor as it is a dystopia of the sign-interpreting animal getting lost in an ever-increasing world of signs, where digital order is imposed on connotational and analogical “chaos”, reducing the flux to the fixed. Something, if viewed as a metaphor, that actually suggest that our minds function digitally, through discrete signs, but whose manifestations are analogically interpreted, is that how one sees oneself is “your mental projection of your digital self”, which would suggest that signs would really be the inherent way through which our minds, our Selfs, and our surroundings appear to us. Although risking to make over-zealous interpretations of the hidden philosophy operating in the film, it would be safe to say that much of its content is gathered from precedent theories similar to this interpretation, and perhaps especially from post-structuralist theory that went further than Barthes’ politically pervaded semiotic thought. With deconstruction, prominent not only in Derrida’s thought but in different ways present in the school of thought overall, binary opposition, the thought prevalent in semiotic theory, is not clear-cut any longer. Baudrillard, whose theory is said to have inspired The Matrix, could explain from a post-structuralist thought how signs are involved in diminishing reality the way the film suggests. His idea of Simulacrum is a historically based critique of how we understand reality, and the specific term Simulation, the current state of Simulacra, means that there are no longer any signifieds, any real referents, only endless signifiers which refers to nothing. This state has been reached successively through history, in which the process has meant an ever-decreasing existence of signifieds, and today, according to Baudrillard, the dominant sign is the model, which stands for nothing but endless reproducibility, and is itself already reproduced. The result is what he calls “hyperreality”. Very much in line with this is Benjamin’s postmodern idea of there no longer being any original works of art, only endless reproductions, only copies, only tokens, which we however are having trouble seeing.
Now the state of the world in present day, and perhaps, as the best example of western progress, especially in America (Baudrillard focuses heavily on American culture in his analyses), would fit what Benjamin outlined in his text, only in a much higher degree. Thus, in The Matrix, the conditions were perfect for the machines to use human culture, now in an ironical state where sign systems, meant to make sense of chaotic reality, themselves have turned the order into a mere “chaotic” hyperreality.
Shocking as it might sound to a philanthropist, the state in which people (are unable to) find themselves in the film, is not necessarily the wrong state of things; ethics aside, it is obviously a state in which we are secure, through habit of mind, and to fix ourselves and our surroundings is, as suggested above, a hidden need we seem to have. Furthermore, as Chandler notes, “Myths can be seen as extended metaphors”, which could actually aid us in this world of signs through conceptualization. He also makes an important point regarding the role of the semiotician, in the need for him or her to be cautious when deconstructing or “denaturalazing” the “wrong” state of things, because of the fact that the semiotician is, whether he wants it or not, a part of the very same culture he is criticizing. This is always a problem where value is an issue in analysis, and one thing to do is to avoid inconsistencies by simply showing an awareness of this problem, although the importance of the critique may seem to be compromised – it is probably even more so when not acknowledging this issue. Thus, Barthes’ project of “demythisizing” could in a world seen as existing of nothing but power structures easily be viewed as an ideology itself, a myth of its own. This is actually often the case with post-structuralist and postmodern theory in general, since they often involve refuting fixed systems and “truths” with means not remote from those of their “enemies”.
[1] Throughout the analysis, quotation marks will indicate a caution using certain terms that otherwise would seem too complacent in current context.
[2] As a parenthesis to this analysis, which is to be focused on semiotics, is that in both Derrida and in Saussure, as well as a large portion of other semiotic theories, there is a heavy influence from Hegel’s thought, which is something suggested peripherally only in Derrida’s text. While this is understandable in the context above, and in post-structuralist theory overall – since it has much to do with refuting the Hegelian notion of something “complete” and “absolute”, which now appears to be “done with” in terms of Hegel himself – it is in my opinion unfortunate that the dialectical thought in Saussure’s theories, as an additional explication of his models, are neglected, since it is obvious that this is the origin of Saussure’s theories. The critique of Hegelian dialectics could contribute to show how Saussure’s system has very much in common with that of Hegel’s, being a “grand system” that neglects precisely the impossibility of fixity that Derrida wants to show.
