Jake
Horsley, Matrix Warrior: Being the One. The Unofficial Handbook (London:
Gollancz 2003); pp.232, £6.99 hbk.
Here’s a question: what
if the Wachowski brothers’ 1999 film The Matrix was not
just an entertaining piece of sf-action-adventure hokum. What if,
instead, it is all true? Imagine it as a message sent via the
medium of the Matrix itself (Hollywood cinema) from someplace outside the
Matrix, to wake us up to our human condition, to alert us all to the fact
‘that we are slaves’. If so, then we are not living the lives
we thought we were living; we are instead inhabiting a virtual reality composed
by oppressive machine-intelligences. What if this were literally true?
How would it appear to us? Well, clearly, it would appear exactly as our
lives presently appear to us. Unless we get ‘unplugged’,
unless we become enlightened, we cannot see past the illusion that has been
created for us.
What should we do in this
circumstance? Should we collaborate with the machines and not rock the
boat? Or should we fight, free ourselves and eventually free everybody
else? Clearly, says The Matrix Warrior, this
latter. This is a book that proceeds from the assumption that the
situation described in The Matrix is real, and tells you where to go
from there.
Does Horsley actually, literally
believe this? Or is it nothing more than a useful metaphor out of which
he can write a zesty pastiche that combines self-help manual and popular movie
cash-in? It is impossible to say. Horsley is far too canny to give
himself away on one side of this or the other. He walks the line between
the two. Sometimes he implies that we must indeed take the film as a
literal reality; sometimes his home-made diagrams, polemical assertions and
rag-bag approach to philosophy read instead as satire and parody
(‘Preposterous!’ he suggests at one point, glossing his own ideas
as ‘ideas fit for schizophrenics and paranoids and David Icke and Anne
Rice vampire nerds’, p.205). It would, of course, vitiate the
purpose of the whole enterprise if it could too easily be reduced to one
programme or another. Horsley’s whole point, if I can hazard a
reductive reading, is to resist programmes altogether.
This makes the book difficult to
review in the conventional terms of reviewing; difficult to praise, and
more difficult to dismiss. The Matrix Warrior is often
daft, sometimes infuriating, sometimes intriguing, occasionally illuminating,
usually fun, sometimes awkward, and definitely worth checking out. I can
imagine cohorts of intelligent teenagers taking it as their Bible, poring over
its pages, feeding avidly on its regurgitated mishmash of Blake, Castenada,
Nietzsche, Zen philosophy, popular culture and spiritualism, and even
attempting to
live their lives in accord with its tenets. I’d wager
most of these teenagers will be male. But there’s nothing wrong
with that, and The Matrix Warrior contains more meat, more
thought-provoking and challenging stuff, than does the average film
tie-in. It certainly contains oodles more than most of the self-help
manuals on the market; you’d certainly do better with this book than you
would with The Road Less Travelled or Seven Habits of Highly
Successful People.
We could see it in the following
light (which is perhaps how the author sees it and perhaps not): Horsley
counsels us to live our lives as if the film is a true reflection of
reality. Whether it this film actually is ‘true’ becomes a
secondary consideration; the primary consideration is whether a life so lived
is more valuable than a life lived according to more conventional
criteria. Horsley believes it is. He suggests that a ‘matrix
warrior’ must work his or her way towards enlightenment (in
Horsley’s terminology, towards ‘second attention’ and
becoming a ‘Lucid’). The unenlightened, those humans still
‘plugged-in’ to the Matrix, are greedy, lustful, ambitious,
envious, conceited, self-pitying, indignant, slothful, and above all petty;
banal shadows of real life. They are all these things because it serves
the ends of the Matrix that they be concerned with these small-minded matters,
rather than opening their eyes to their larger reality.
The enlightened, on the other hand,
do not have to be physically unplugged, as Keanu Reeves was in the movie, to
become Matrix Warriors. They can work towards this literal liberation by
living their Matrix lives according to a new code; becoming detached,
passionate, ruthless, graceful, patient, imaginative, full of laughter, living
with humility and prowess. They should minimise their negative emotions
and maximise their positive emotions (because, Horsley says, the secret of
secrets of the universe is that ‘the Earth is a factory, and what it
manufactures and processes is emotion’, p.69).
It is all, it seems, about
‘energy’, a term Horsley deploys with all the vagueness and
imprecision of the New Age crystal-hugging types he elsewhere dismisses
(‘the paltry and rigged evidence of these quasi-religions [of which] New
Ageism is the latest and the most lacklustre example’, p.115). He
tells us that ‘energy begets energy’ (p.71). What kinds of
energy, we might wonder? Kinetic energy? Potential energy?
But, no, he means ‘energy’ in a loosely metaphorical sense, except
that he doesn’t, because his Matrix is not a metaphor but a literal
truth. In fact I suspect by energy he really means Will and Action, and
above all Will, because the imprint of Schopenhauer, minus the pessimism, is
everywhere in this little book. If Horsley hasn’t read Schopenhauer
then he’s certainly red people who have read Schopenhauer.
The point is that Horsley finds in The
Matrix a new _expression of an older mythos, one he also finds in
William Blake, William Burroughs and Philip K Dick. Those three authors
agreed with one of the main currents of philosophical thought, namely as far as
the universe goes a distinction must be made between what it actually is and what
it only appears to be. Most philosophers since the Ancient Greeks have interrogated
the cosmos in these terms. What is behind the world of appearances?
What is the nature of the ‘reality’ that is hidden behind the
veil? If you are Heraclitus it is ‘flow’; if you are Plato it
is the pure and eternal realm of the Forms; if you are a neo-Platonist, a
Christian or a Muslim it is ‘God’; if you are Schopenhauer
(or his disciple, Nietzsche) it is ‘Will’; if you are a Marxist it
is the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, obscured by the ideology of the
ruling classes; if you’re Freud it’s the unconscious and its
currency of sex and death; and if you are a postmodernist then there is nothing
at all behind the world of appearances, there are only simulacra. You
pays, as the saying goes, your money and you takes your choice.
Blake, Burroughs and Dick shared a
more paranoid (or, if you agree with them, a less illusioned) vision of this
state of things. To them, the world of appearance is a dungeon, a trap, a
hellish adventure, something to be despised and resisted. The reality of transcendent
apprehension is obscured by these appearances. We must break on through
to the other side, we must disarrange the logic of the seeming-world and
shatter it, we must free our minds. We must (in Blake’s
resonant words) create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s. A
long passage is quoted from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as epigraph
to the book, and Horsley draws extensively on Blake’s personal
myth. According to Blake, ‘Man’ has once been infinite and
eternal energy, but following a ‘fall’ he (we) had become trapped
in the constricting prisons of the five senses. If we could cleanse the
doors of our perception we would see the world as it truly
is, infinite, but
too much of our lives are concerned with the strategies of blindness,
rationalist, science, obedience, conventionality, metaphysics. Instead of this,
said Blake, we should use our own instincts, our own energy
(‘Energy’, he thought ‘ is eternal delight’) and our
own Imaginations to escape from this prison. Taking The Matrix as a new
version of this Blakean vision is an attractive and in many ways a plausible
reading of the film. If Horsley makes Blake, Burroughs and Dick a little
better known to the multitude then he will have done a great thing.
What should we make, though, of The
Matrix Warrior as a Guide Book to Living in the Modern World? I could
endorse it, indulgently, as fun, as harmless, as a souped-up pomo-wise variant
of traditional Self-Help books (‘accentuate the positive!’
‘don’t be distracted by banalities!’ ‘discipline
yourself!’ ‘be courteous but not craven!’ and so on).
But I won’t do this. To quote Blake again, as Horsley himself does,
opposition is true friendship. Horsley. I’m sure,
would be indifferent to my praise and endorsement, and would prefer opposition.
Opposition, then, is the least I can provide. His book is not harmless;
it is harmful and it is wrong. Or so it seems to my plugged-in
perspective.
My main problem with this book is
that it contains (in philosophical shorthand) too much Nietzsche and not enough
Spinoza. Horsley valorises ‘freedom’ above all other things;
his ‘Matrix Warrior’ is an ideal ‘superman’, in charge
of his own destiny, with genuine free-will rather than the pre-programmed
illusion of free-will that most people in the world mistake for freedom.
But this ‘warrior’, this ubermensch standing on top of the mountain
drunk on his own Will-to-Power, is himself a culturally conditioned and
historically determined individual. He is myth, not reality; a function
of a particular Romantic and post-Romantic ideology.
This mythic figure emerges at a
particular moment in the development of western capitalism; the Enlightenment
valorisation of ‘Reason’ combined with the bourgeois will-to-money
promoted a particular ideological construction of the Man Alone, freed from
social responsibilities, able to do purely as he wills. Terry
Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic ties in
this invention of the mythic ‘absolutely free bourgeois individual’
with the Romantic invention of the category of the Aesthetic. We find
this figure in Blake, Byron, Shelley and Keats; he’s portrayed in Casper
David Friedrich’s famous picture of a man standing with his back to us on
top of an alp, gazing at the sublime landscape below him. It is a myth
that has intoxicated many artists since then: Rimbaud tried to live his life
according to his myth (a course of action that meant he died young); so did
Alistair Crowley, the Beat poets, and countless rock stars from the 1960s to
the present day. But, attractive as it is (of course we’d all
rather be Jim Morrison than Friedrich Engels) it remains an ideological
construction. It is not true. It is the hypostisation of capital,
the unfettered unit of money circulating without restriction. Human
beings are not like this; we are social creatures.
Horsley, in orthodox Romantic
manner, sees Imagination as one of the cardinal forces of the
enlightened. Shelley said that ‘the great instrument of moral good
is the imagination’. Elvis Costello, on the other hand, said that ‘imagination
can be a powerful deceiver’. Elvis has the edge on Percy Bysshe,
I’d say. Horsley has broken one of the crucial Blakean
commands. He has not Created a System of his own; he has become
enslav’d to another man’s, or to the system of two other men (the
brothers Wachowski). Accordingly he has opened himself to a series of
problems.
Burroughs, for instance, advised
that we ‘exterminate all rational thought’ as a means of combating
‘the system’ in which we live. Horsley advocates
Burroughs’ cut-up philosophy as a strategy for fighting the Matrix.
But Burroughs’ own beliefs were deeply misogynistic: he shot his
own wife and believed that the women he met were examples of malign alien life
who were trying to trap and devour him. His paranoia, in other words, was
not general; it was gender-specific. There’s an argument that the The
Matrix does something similar.
Women are acceptable in the world of
the film only providing [a] they approximate to men (the lethal-kicking,
gun-toting, emotionally repressed Trinity and Switch), or [b] they are mumsy,
unthreatening, cookie-baking figures, such as the Oracle. If they are
neither, and especially if they are explicitly sexualised (the Woman in the Red
Dress) then they are actively dangerous. Sex must be shunned, or impossibly
idealised. According to Horsley, ‘sex is either a lewd and slightly
sordid indulgence, a potentially deadly distraction, a total irrelevance, or
else an act of world-saving numinosity’ (p.105). Th
is is so
bizarrely puritanical an assertion it is difficult to know what to do with
it. Many generations of misogynistic men have believed it of course, with
the word ‘sex’ replaced with the phrase ‘sex with
women’. In fact it is another aspect of the same myth of bourgeois
individualism. It is the code of the sharply defined and free Nietzschean
superman, a man—always a man—for whom contact with women is risky
because it may erode the walls of the self (the ‘sapping of vital
fluids’ that the American colonel in Dr Strangelove was so
fretful about; a character, incidentally, who exhibited all the qualities
of a Horsleyan Matrix Warrior). ‘Man should be educated for
war,’ says Nietzsche, ‘and woman for the recreation of the
warrior. All else is folly.’ Horsley is in effect saying to
his constituency of bright adolescent males ‘follow this
path!’ I’d say, ‘don’t be an arsehole, and
don’t confuse your own muddle of sexual yearning/guilt with the way the
world actually is’. But then I haven’t written this book.
A second problem, related I think,
has to do with the quality of ‘ruthlessness’ that Horsley sees as
so valuable a feature of his Matrix Warrior. The characters in the film The
Matrix are certainly ruthless; they kill a great many people, on the
grounds that these people are too immured in the matrix to be unplugged and
that they are therefore the enemy. They feel no remorse that they are
thereby murdering countless ordinary people. Horsley soft-peddles
this. He asserts on several occasions that Matrix Warriors, though
necessarily ruthless, are not psychopaths. Horsley’s version of
ruthlessness involves a watery sense of ‘speaking plainly, without
mincing words, to override the fear of offending’ and not
‘fussing’ or ‘beating around the bush’ (p.61).
But when Neo and Trinity shoot dead scores of government employees in their
attempt to rescue Morpheus they are doing much more than this. This scene
is exciting as cinema, but would be appalling as reality. Horsley
isn’t, of course, trying to write a recruitment manual for the Shining Path
guerrillas; but perhaps, if he had the courage of his convictions, he ought to
be.
If we really want to take the Matrix
seriously as a manual for living our lives, then killing people will become one
of the things we do. A Matrix Warrior must, surely, do more than
discipline their body and refuse to buy into the world of consumer
durables. He or she must also become a terrorist in the strict sense of
the word. He or she must be prepared to kill repeatedly, and to feel no
guilt or anxiety about this. This is ‘ruthlessness’.
It’s also so close to psychopathy as to be, well, exactly the same thing.
This is the shadow side of the
superman ethos; it shades inevitably into fascism. And the tone of The
Matrix Warrior as well as its content tends to colour the book in this
light. Chapter after chapter pours scorn and derision on the common herd
of humanity, on their venal and petty failings, their limitations, their
selfishnesses. At the same time, the book valorises an elite knighthood
of warriors who have risen above such banality, who live according to a higher
code, beyond conventional ‘good’ and ‘evil’, who eschew
‘slave mentality’ and embody a ruthless will-to-power. If we
were, genuinely, to put this ethos into practice in the world then we would be
living according to a fascistic ethic. It is not exactly a criticism of
the movie to say this; it is only to make the point that appreciating a text is
very different from trying to live one’s life according to the values
embodied in that text. The one act is aesthetic, the other
political. Gramsci somewhere defines fascism as precisely this blurring
of the boundary between aesthetics and politics (so a Nazi says, ‘my
aesthetic ideal is blond hair and blue eyes, and I shall turn this aesthetic
into a political reality by rounding up Jews and Slavs and exterminating
them…’) It would be similarly fascistic to try and live
according to the code of Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings. What
is dangerous about Horsley’s book is that it presents its fascistic ideal
in terms of ‘love’, ‘emotion’,
‘transcendence’ and so on, rather than in terms of the practical
ethical effect of a life so lived.
Here’s an alternative.
Read Spinoza: The Matrix’s much vaunted ‘letting
it all go’ means above all letting go the illusion that there is any such
thing as free will at all (and especially abandoning the bizarre notion that
free will inheres in those strong men who can separate themselves out from the
rest of humanity, treating everybody else with contempt and ruthless violence).
Read Marx: freedom can be gained only by collective action, not by a
self-satisfying but selfish policy of personal
gratification-by-discipline. Whether we live in a real Matrix or only a
metaphorical Matrix, the answer is not Fascism, but a world in which the free
development of one is the free development of all.
I suggest this opposition in the
spirit of true friendship. Horsley might well say that I’m too plugged-in
to the Matrix to be able to appreciate the radical nature of his
suggestions. I certa
inly have no ambitions to be ‘the One’,
any more than I’d like to see ‘One People, One Vision, One
Leader’ become the watchword of my times. I repudiate
Horsley’s intellectual jurisdiction over my life. Indeed, if he
comes to me with his juris-my-diction crap he can cram it up his … uh-oh,
he seems to be running along the walls and kicking me in the
chest—agh—
Adam Roberts, April 2003
To read Jake’s “Open Response” to the Above, go
further up the arsehole of criticism
Back to Matrix
Warrior