“...the willed and violent transformation of a drab peasant object world into the most glorious materialization of pure color in oil paint is to be seen as a Utopian gesture, an act of compensation which ends up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the senses, or at least of that supreme sense -- sight, the visual, the eye -- which it now reconstitutes for us as a semiautonomous space in its own right, a part of some new division of labor in the body of capital, some new fragmentation of the emergent sensorium which replicates the specializations and divisions of capitalist life at the same time that it seeks in precisely such fragmentation a desperate Utopian compensation for them.
...the work of art emerges within the gap between Earth and World, or...the meaningless materiality of the body and nature and the meaning endowment of history and of the social”
Would the Matrix, for Jameson, represent some kind of tension between high modernism and post modernism? It is clear that in the context of the film, the Matrix is a work of art created as an act of compensation for the misery and decay the planet has fallen into. The space of the Matrix is semiautonomous in that it operates/exists both within and without the real world. However, what the matrix represents is the commodification of reality. Furthermore, nothing in this work of art “organizes even a minimal place for the viewers,” who have been absorbed into it and confront it in their everyday lives in addition to the few who are able to view it from outside. It can only be viewed as a waterfall of code on a computer screen. The characters of the film are able to jump in and out of this sea of information, and for me raising the following questions: Is there a difference between a genuine reality and a simulation? If depth is of the history and of the social does this commodification of reality make it any less “real” when the actions performed in both spaces shape the historical and social realities of the other?
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