Joshua Clover

This was a required textbook for a course, otherwise I can’t imagine myself paying for an analytical look at The Matrix.

The first third of Clover’s book is pretty good as he reviews a short history of turn-of-the-millennium media recognizing the transition from looking “into” a world to looking “around” a world. It’s A Wonderful Life give us a look at any small town in America in 1948, but The Godfather just three decades later is a specific world unknown to it’s viewers. How much more The Matrix when the characters literally inhabit a constructed world that disassembles throughout the series?

The second third of the book gets bogged down in an attempt to review the solipsistic references of the film, which culminates in the final third entirely embracing the idea that the movie is Marxist in worldview. (MATRIX = MARX IT, as Clover argues as a high school paper might) A single paragraph dismisses the Christian references (Neo is “my savior, man”, dead and resurrected, the foretold hero) as a “misfortune”—seemingly as much for the fact that it’s difficult to reconcile a single hero to Marxist ideology as for the whiteness of the main cast member. (Keanu is born in Lebanon to a English mother and Chinese-Hawaiian-Portuguese father. Reducing him to skin tone seems to miss the point of his casting.)

The Matrix is infamous for the Wachowskis slipping in as many references to modern philosophy as possible. To focus on one as the answer is to play directly to their desire. The philosophy smorgasbord is the message. It’s McLuhan all the way down.… (mere)

Baltimore, Ferguson, Tottenham, Clichy-sous-Bois, Oakland. Ours has become an "age of riots" as the struggle of people versus state and capital has taken to the streets. Award-winning poet and scholar Joshua Clover offers a new understanding of this present moment and its history. Rioting was the central form of protest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was supplanted by the strike in the early nineteenth century. It returned to prominence in the 1970s, profoundly changed along with the coordinates of race and class.
From early wage demands to recent social justice campaigns pursued through occupations and blockades. Clover connects these protests to the upheavals of a sclerotic economy in a state of moral collapse. Historical events such as the global economic crisis of 1973 and the decline of organized labor, viewed from the perspective of vast social transformations, are the proper context for understanding these eruptions of discontent. As social unrest against an unsustainable order continues to grow, this valuable history will help guide future antagonists in their struggles toward a revolutionary horizon.
Joshua Clover is a Professor of Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis. A widely published essayist, poet, and cultural theorist, his most recent books are Red Epic and 1989: Bob Dylan didn't have this to sing about.… (mere)