Yesterday I returned to academics after a thirteen year hiatus. I have been granted the privilege of auditing a graduate-level seminar lead by Dr. Arthur Kroker. Dr. Kroker is a widely acknowledged Canadian theorist, and, with his wife Mariloise, is editor of the venerable and now entirely on-line journal ctheory.

Six years ago a film took the pop culture world by storm. It was called The Matrix. Everyone thought this film was about the Internet and our virtual future. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Matrix was about the Body. The most important moment in the Matrix is the one that confused people the most. It is the moment when Morpheus and his followers locate Neo’s pod on the great biochemical power grid that supports the machine world.

Sitting in the room with the mirror, Morpheus offers Neo the choice of a red or blue pill. The pills are little trojan horse software programs. One would fix Neo so he can live a quiet life on the Matrix and not be bothered by the things that keep him up at night. The other will help him to “see how far the rabbit hole really goes.” In other words, it will free him from the Matrix and help him see the world as it really is. In the words of Morpheus, “The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”

This was the key theoretical insight that drove much of cultural and political theoretical praxis in the nineties. The Matrix was the Foucauldian paradigm of power - not the power of violence and death at the hands of the King, but the power of dominant disourses and disciplines to achieve confomative compliance. As with the Matrix, deviance is dealt with as a programming problem.

When Neo takes the Red Pill, all of that falls away and we witness a birth. The re-birth of The Body. The virtual Mr. Anderson is simply switched off as the drone arrives to remove the leads, power couplings and feeding tubes from Neo’s apparently very real and damaged body. For the first time in his life, Neo appears to be off-grid. He is flushed from his pod (the trojan has convinced the Matrix he is dead) and falls into the water to be collected - saved - by Morpheus.

This was 1999. This was prior to 9/11 and SARS. We followed Neo’s adventures as he regained his connection with his real body, and learned to master the Matrix - to re-enter it and bend it to his will. Eventually, in the third installment, Neo becomes the Deleuzian War Machine, not needing to jack in at all, moving between the Matrix and the Real World at will, operating in the smooth spaces of his new found power.

But the Matrix sequels failed to impress. Visually amazing and polished, they appeared on the scene post 9/11, post SARS and after the re-emergence of the Body as the location of the contemporary stuggles of the 21st Century. The Matrix sequels came too late, while the original was slightly early.

We learned in the third installment that the Matrix was not the first iteration of the simulated world made for people by the machines. No, people had revolted against the simple bliss of the first iterations and had destroyed them. The Architect found that dissent was needed, and thus the cycle of The One and the Rise of Zion was begun and played out repeatedly, an operational simulation for the participants. Had Zion actually existed in previous iterations? Was the Zion of Neo’s time real, or had the Matrix simply gone haywire in this iteration? It doesn’t matter, since the ability of Power to adapt and absorb any politics founded on manipulation of its game had been demonstrated, and the need for an off-grid form of resistance established. This is why the sequels seem to quiver, frozen in the moment of transition from the 20th to the 21st century. The action happens mainly inside the Matrix, and the reality of Zion is cast into doubt by the exegesis of the Architect. Were the Watchowski Brothers telling us a story of our past or our future? They undoubtedly struggled with all this, and the result shows in this undecideability.

This re-birth of the Body is the real message of The Matrix films. The franchise lives on, mutated into a giant Internet-based MMRPG. How ironic. No, the key moment is the moment Neo is born. The moment he discovers his body, his actual body that needs and suffers.

Yesterday in class we were introduced to the ideas of several writers who have focussed on the Body. Post-humanist and post-feminists. Dr. Kroker told us of his own journey through theory in the nineties, through all the discussions of the erasure of the body, virtuality and identity on the network, and how it was all wrong. Some hyperbole there, I’m sure, but contemporary theory does move forward in an all-embracing manner, one generations’ popular angles and cuts into perennial problems give way and fall, expended, to the sides of history’s paths, as more prescient and finely tuned-in ideas come forward. I see theory as a form of art. “Artists are the antennae of the race,” said Ezra Pound.

So, while I was away, theory has kept pace with the times and we are now where we are in history as in theory. Dr. Kroker spoke eloquently and at length about the irruption of the Body in contemporary history and contemporary theory. The Body figures prominently in our experience of the world, emerging as central in the figures of the terrorist martyr, the carrier of disease, the victims of torture, and in our madly accellerating appetite for pleasure, beauty and longevity. Most importantly and honestly, Dr. Kroker threw into doubt the focus on the Body and its new-found presence by beginning to inquire into the status of the Body in New Orleans, its dissapearance and its “abuse-value.” It is a Niezschean honesty that is always simultaneously constructing and deconstructing.

What are the political implications for Bodies in today’s world. How are bodies treated? How are they marginalized and disappeared? These are just the beginnings of the questons we will be addressing over the course of the semester, and it promises to be a fascinating and highly current.

And so I was taken back to George Orwell’s Winston Smith, and John Hurt’s achingly visceral portrayal of him. Seldom in literature has there been such a surveilled, tortured, erased and desiring body. If, as Dr. Kroker suggests, the body is a torture chamber or a pleasure palace, who or what occupies these spaces? Is it the Subject? If so, what is its status in a discourse that concerns itself so overtly with the Body? What of self-surveillance? Do we ever really recognize or willingly own our own bodies? Isn’t there always a disconnect when we see ourselves on video or listen to our own voices? Is our self-image co-extensive with our bodies? Or is it against it and with the holographic perfect body housed on the mainframe of the Grid Architects? Is the Body destined to be abandoned again once we realize that our ambition outstrips our ability to adapt?

I also was taken back to my U of Regina Campion College class with Dr. George Marshall, where he and just three of us spent a semester with Maurice Marleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, and I afterward carried on with other works such as Eye and Mind, Cezanne’s Doubt, Adventures of the Dialectic, and the posthumous The Visible and the Invisible. Dr. Kroker told us of recent writers and their postulation of the Body as the new location of resistance. He described the emergence of new ideas about ritual and inter-relation “off-grid” as holding promise for a new politics that doesn’t fall into the trap of operational simulation. It made me think of the one-to-many nature of the dominant form of Power, and how being on-grid assumes a two-way exposure to the root source of this Power, whether it be routed through one’s colleagues, friends and family as a form of community self-discipline, or routed directly from the wellspring of cultural authority through media, religion, fashion, etc..

I then thought of my own work with social networking technologies, and the emerging forms of many-to-many relationships that form grids within the Grid, relationships that avoid the feedback loop that passes through the core of Power, but use the sub-systems and semi-autonomous circuits of Power nonetheless. Is the Medium the Message? Has the Message taken a detour through its commercial Other? How does this relate to the Body? The Body would seem to be hidden behind this artifice. Then I thought of Merlau-Ponty again, and the notion of The Flesh. If the new politics of resistance involves a return to the Body, then what of Merleau-Ponty’s posthumously published final thoughts on The Flesh or “the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its spontaneous activity.” If our bodies can be shown to be co-extensive and interdependent, what is the political status of the Chiasm? Am I touching or being touched? And if the Uncertainty Principle is operative at the level of the universe, then why not at the level of Bodies?

I look forward to exploring these and many more questions. It is great to be back in a mileu where questions like these have currency and import. I missed it.