Postmodern fatigue

[robinturner]

The one drawback of doing this course on The Matrix is that I'm having to read a lot of postmodernist stuff. Well, chr0me_kitten did warn me!

Question 1: Does the recent history of continental philosophy mirror Baudrillard's precession of simulacra?

Question 2: Are students who post essays on critical theory on the web genuinely bad writers, or are their shortcomings in spelling, punctuation and general clarity an attempt to avoid co-optation?

Comments

[cibetky.livejournal.com]

Is The Matrix really so philosophically relevant? :-) I've read some harsh critiques of the new Matrix that it is just an average spectacular science fiction movie with quasi-philosophical dialogues that are nothing but a banal fill-in and only slow down the plot.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I'm reserving judgement on the second film until I can watch it again to concentrate on the ideas rather than being wowed by the action and special effects. Philosophically, it seems to be developing some of the ideas raised in the first film about free will and personhood, but as I just said, I'll need to take another look to see how well it does it.

The first film is certainly philosophically relevant, which is not the same as saying it has a definite philosophical thesis. What it does is throw in a mish-mash of symbols, allusions and questions which the viewer is expected to play around with. Certainly plenty of philosophers have had fun with the film, and it goes further than reference-spotting (e.g. the famous appearance of a copy of Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulations", which apparently was required reading for the cast).

[evilbil.livejournal.com]

i thought about your course today and decided it was a little risky to develope it before the third film came out. I'd say that there's a noticeable chance that it will muddle up its philosophical messages in an effort to close the series. I'd say the final words of the film might end up being one of the following:
"oh, love is the answer!" 23%
"wait, you mean its a matrix within a matrix within a matrix?" 47%
"so we thought we were in a matrix but we're actually only characters in a movie?" 35%

[solri.livejournal.com]

Well that's half the fun - the course starts in September, so half way through it, we all get to go and see Revolutions together and find out how wrong we were.