Further semiotic collapse.

[lapsedmodernist]

Wow, so I took Sudafed before going to bed, and now that I have been unable to sleep for hours I am having a flashback to discovering earlier today in Walgreens how it's a behind-the-counter medication. Not prescription but you do have to ask the pharmacist, which I found utterly bizarre, especially when the pharmacist said "well, some people abuse it so we track who uses it." But they didn't get my name, or anything, so I just have to assume that there are microscopic tracker devices implanted in the Sudafed pills. Oh yeah, I just googled it and apparently it's Step 1 to making meth. Yay for me, who tries to avoid all substances more speedy than coffee.

Anyway, I ate a xanax and am hoping to be able to get a couple of hours of sleep before 9AM, which is when I should get up.

This insomnia and speediness is a perfect state for thinking about the totally insane book apropos sent me (thank you, B!), Matrix Warrior: Being the One. It's written by this dude who over-tripped with shamans and decided that The Matrix is real and he is The One and at first I thought it was, like, this new genre of self-help, like a self-help book using The Matrix as a central metaphor, which I could see, but NO. This is no metaphor, this dude REALLY thinks that The Matrix (the movie) is, essentially a documentary masked as fiction. Everything in that movie is real, and he has learned how to be The One (a Matrix Warrior) and the book can help you be a Matrix Warrior, too. As apropos and I like to classify such things, this falls under the category of "neat." Note the quotation marks. "Neat" is a hypocognized euphemism for "totally effin' insane, but really interesting to consider from an anthropological standpoint." Other things that are "neat": Mark Boyer, visual semiotics of the Patricia Field designer ads, Ana/Mia support bracelets, Otherkin (also the subspecialized lj "otherkin" communities like this one for polyamorous multiple-personality otherkin), etc.

But back to the Matrix Warrior. So for, like, half of the book I really thought this was a Paradigmatic Metaphor. I think this is due to the fact that you can't really talk about how The Matrix is real without it sounding like a metaphor. But it's really, really not. I will try to outline this dude's main theses:

1. Everything in "The Matrix" the movie is absolutely, literally true
2. In the same way that people awakening to the truth of The Matrix in the movie can receive transmissions from "the real world" (like Neo's message on the computer screen, the white rabbit, etc.), so can we. "The Matrix" the movie is our transmission from "the real world" except we can't see it for what it is.
3. We are food for some "other beings"--not necessarily metal machines, but definitely AI. They feed on our emotions (here was the part I was unclear about, apropos, maybe you can clarify? I think he sez that the AI Overlords feed on our negative emotions, and thus the Matrix is constructed in a way that 90% of our experience is abject misery, with occasional flashes of joy and love. Then I think he is saying that this matrix is just the first matrix that will be reloaded, because what they really want to feed on is "love" and they are conditioning us how to love in a world without hope, and that is a distilled, true essence of love they can feed on. BUT at the same time he says learning to love in this predicament is the first step to becoming a Ludite--a.k.a. the Matrix Warrior. So are the goals of the Matrix Warriors and of the Matrix Creators convergent?)
4. The one thing AI can never understand or imitate is true laughter, so Matrix Warriors should laugh as much as possible. But AI IS aware or and fond of using "irony." He proceeds to give examples of this AI irony by a long list of retarded caveats that manufacturers put on products, the sort often quoted by the same people who will ask you at a party "no, but why DO people drive on parkways and park on driveways?!"--such as "don't turn upside down" at the bottom of a cake box, "don't use while asleep" on a blowdryer, "don't iron clothes on body" on an iron, etc. He encourages Matrix Warriors to notice this irony because it can be useful as ammunition as it might reveal cracks in the system (the analogy he uses is a grandiloquent villain going on and on about his evil plans and revealing the secret component of his plan in the process, enabling the hero to foil his plans). Also he encourages the Matrix Warriors to laugh at these ironies "for much needed comic relief."

All of this is particularly interesting to me in light of the conversations apropos and I have been having about how the Matrix movies must be totally becoming a popular narrative trope in contemporary paranoid-schizophrenic fantasies, our post-millenial disinformation follow-up to Roswell and aliens and tinfoil, now that our national narrative is explicity schizophrenic itself, and the discourse of biosociality is negotiatied on the razor's edge between technophilia and technophobia. I think that watching "The Matrix" can provide a heuristic for paranoia-schizophrenia and I wonder if speciations of narrative in this context can re-map schizophrenia as a culture-bound syndrome (or, I guess, a zeitgeist-bound syndrome, since in a sense schizophrenia is already a culture-bound syndrome). amadea, what do you think?

I have more to say about that, but I think I can start to feel the xanax (hopefully), so one last sort-of related thing I want to say is about Dean Koontz, who is a horrible writer, who thinks he is a good writer, but I went through a phase where I read him compulsively, fascinated by how sheerly weird his plotlines are. Anyway, one of his novels is called False Memory and it features a sociopathic psychiatrist who takes a page from "The Manchurian Candidate" and hypnotizes his patients into "sleepers" by way of Japanese haikus. Basically in the book two of the patients figure out what is going on, find the proper haikus to de-hypnotize themselves, then battle the sociopathic psychiatrist. During the climactic scenes of the novel, they enlist the help of a paranoid patient of his, whom he hypnotized into a Keanu Reeves phobia, like, she thinks that Keanu follows her all the time and is obssesed with her, and is which enables them to convince her that The Matrix is real and that actually she is being recruited to be part of the Resistance in the Matrix, and then, as part of her mission, she kills the sociopathic psychiatrist. It's so very.

Sorry for the disjointed nature of this entry. Now I will try to go to sleep where in my dreams I am a little teapot Matrix Warrior.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Here in Texas. where I guess people are just more prone to make meth, you have to sign a register saying how many grams of Sudafed you're buying.

[bajatierra.livejournal.com]

Here in Texas. where I guess people are just more prone to make meth, you have to sign a register saying how many grams of Sudafed you're buying.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Neat. Neato, in fact.

[circekills.livejournal.com]

i think sudafed is basically drugstore crack. i cannot take the stuff because it makes my toes curl up, sweat, and my heart wants to leap out of my chest like a caged animal. very unpleasant. it's not even a good feeling! why would people want that cracked out speedy feeling? hmmm i guess i'll never be a good meth head and on "cops."

[isolt.livejournal.com]

Polyamourous multiple-personality disorder otherkin?

Wha?

I so need to use this in my term paper.

[apropos.livejournal.com]

Thank you for reviewing the book for me. Part of the reason I sent it to you was that I was incapable of reading more than a page or two at a time, and I found the narrative really hard to follow.

But AI IS aware or and fond of using "irony." He proceeds to give examples of this AI irony by a long list of retarded caveats that manufacturers put on products... "don't turn upside down" at the bottom of a cake box, "don't use while asleep" on a blowdryer, "don't iron clothes on body" on an iron, etc

I didn't know about this!!! This is the place where schizophrenia can make a very seamless graft. So, the question remains, if you iron your clothes while they're on your body, what will happen to AI?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I didn't even think of that! Do you think "ironing clothes on body" could be, like, PROOF of AI/resistance to the heuristic, hence the seamless graft?

Neat

[congogirl.livejournal.com]

[re: sudafed, I had no idea, i am such an innocent when it comes to illegal substances.... maybe they 'track' you in that good ole racial/other profiling kind of way.]

bananapouch and I use 'neat' to mean, That knitted garment has some really interesting colorwork and techniques that we would like to learn, but we would NEVER EVER wear that thing.'

[yanatonage.livejournal.com]

hi, can you tell me what the word "hypocognize" means? I looked it up on dictionary.com and wikipedia but it's not there.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

hypercognition/hypocognition is a distinction that Robert Levy used in his ethnography "The Tahitians." According to him, hypercognized emotions are the ones about which there is considerable cultural doctrine--metaphores, effects, what to do about it, etc. Other affective states that are not so clearly delineated or culturally elaborated and those are the ones he calls “hypocognized emotions." So, his ethnographic data showed that anger was hypercognized among the Tahitians, but loneliness was not. Loneliness IS something that is hypercognized in our culture, but other emotive states aren't, they are the ones that don't have explicit terms for them, but are rather talked about through equivocation, or borrowing from other languages, like feeling "unheimlich" or "feeling off".

[dcart.livejournal.com]

I was super into Baudrillard when The Matrix came out. So I was a little obsessed with it. I think at one point in time I probably could have cited a source for damn near every major theme or monologue in the whole thing. I went through a phase in late 99 and early 2000 where I had The Matrix and Fight Club on DVD and just watched them over and over and over again, often back to back.

I almost think those movies could cause a person to have a paranoid break of some kind.