Knock, Knock, Neo. The Matrix Has You...

            Performance reviews are never really enjoyable; in the teaching biz they can be downright harrowing. Normally, someone in a position of authority sits in on your class. You give them a lesson plan ahead of time and then they judge you based upon what you do in one class on one day. Moreover, as one of my colleagues like to say, teaching an English class is kinda like playing jazz: it involves a lot of improvisation, a lot of riffing off the vibe thrown out by your class mates. Some days, the students and I, we’re groovin’ to same vibe; other days…well, we’re havin’ creative differences. So how can one person really judge what I do by sitting in one day, watching us, messin’ up our dynamic? Well…they can’t. 

I had some really bad experiences with performance reviews when I taught high school. The administrators saw what they wanted to see, and they wanted to see that I was bad at my job. Why? Simply put: I didn’t fit in. Was I bad? Well, I wasn’t good: I was a first year teacher. While I’m still no “master teacher,” I’m a lot better and I think I’ll continue to improve.

Observations and performance reviews at my current job have been an entirely positive experience. Still, I will never quite get over the trauma of a politicized version of the process that surpassed the paranoid fantasies of my most nightmarish visions of “observation.” —They! Are! Watching!— So, even as I accept that we need some quality control, at some level I will always consider the corporate performance review as just another manifestation of post-modern bullshit, another example of what Jean Baudrillard calls “simulacra.”

Who is Jean Baudrillard?  What are simulacra? Funny you should ask that, because Baudrillard’s work was at the center of a class that I taught just last week, a lesson that was the subject of…an observation!

In my second semester composition class, I rely on a sci-fi theme.  In addition to actual stories by people like Mary Shelley and Ray Bradbury, the course textbook also includes a number of theoretical texts, not actual stories but “philosophical” texts that offer ways of understanding stories.  These readings, by people like Sigmund Freud and Jean Paul Sartre, can be quite intimidating for my students, so I pair them with movies rather than written texts.  This way the students can experiment with these complex concepts without also having to contend with an intimidating primary text. Jean Baudrillard is the author of the theoretical text that I pair with the best known film by The Wachowski Brother’s, The Matrix. The excerpt, called “The Precession of Simulacra,” comes from Baudrillard’s seminal book, Simulation and Simulacra. 

Haven’t heard of it?  That’s okay, but it has become a rather well know philosophical text. In the book, Baudrillard offers and extended and damning critique of American-style, mass-produced popular culture, an entire system of living that is based on…well, nothing really. I use the example of Corporal Klinger to introduce students to the concept. Presumable, once upon a time, Max Klinger dressed like a man and behaved in some semblance of sanity. But then he gets drafted. He’s trying to get out of the Army, so he begins to cross-dress and indulge his every mad impulse. He becomes a dissimulator, a liar…but it doesn’t work. No one believes that Klinger is gay or crazy. So, why does he keep doing it?  Why does he go from dissimulation to…all out simulation?

This is not a pipe. It's not. Really, it isn't.

If everyone knows the lie is a lie—including the liar—it’s no longer a lie. Klinger’s behavior becomes its own purpose. In fact, I would go far as to claim that Klinger is supposed to be a bad liar. It’s even funnier that way. It’s entertaining. Who cares why he does what he does? It’s a trope of the situation comedy. Are any tropes of television comedy “true”?  Do you have a stock catch phrase? Is dad always the fool?  Is the neighbor always zany? It’s not true…but it’s not a lie either. Rather, mass culture has no relation to the truth at all. It’s just a show.  

This lack of relation to truth and falsehood goes far beyond the strictly defined realm of entertainment. Think of political rhetoric. Do politicians or the media ever bother to define terms like “freedom”? Why do “liberals” always call themselves “progressives”?  And why do Republicans insist on referring to the “Democrat” party?  Isn’t part of our issue with our leaders a suspicion that they don’t believe in any of the ideals in which they claim to believe?

Do we even want them to be honest?  Do we want to know that they have sexual desires? Or that they’re friends with people in the opposing party? Or that they’re really atheists? Or that they are susceptible to corruption? Or that they have all gotten their positions through privilege and good fortune and owing favors to rich people? And is the fascination with politics of any more substance than our fascination with sports or soap operas?  Does it really matter who’s president? I wonder…

And what is the fascination with the news? Isn’t it just another show appealing to our thirst for sex and violence?

And what is Coca-Cola? Is doesn’t have cocaine in it.  And what the hell is a cola nut anyhow? And who really cares? By and large, cola beverages don’t contain ANY cola nut.

And what’s in McDonald’s? And where does Starbucks coffee come from?  And why does it all taste the same? And what is “free” or “fair” trade? And was Steve Jobs really a hippie? Where was my iPhone made? Who made it?  Is China a “communist” country? And what’s the point of a performance review? And does political correctness serve to make bigotry better? And what about affirmative action and global warming and the organic food industry and on and on and on… Who the fuck knows?

These bits of simulacra add up.

We live in a “reality” constructed of bricks of simulacrum.

How many seconds are you awake before you confront mass culture?

My iPhone wakes me up.

These simulacra are not lies…but are equally not “true.”

So, according to Baudrillard, we live in a simulation. Our brains are so polluted by bullshit that our existence is now virtual. We only know that main street is real because the Sunset Strip plays the role of fantasy land.  We only know that Mitt Romney is moderate because ultra-conservatives are now promoting barriers to reproductive health.  We only know that Obama is liberal because so many people call him a socialist.  There is no objective reality in mass culture, for “reality” is defined in relative terms.  Nothing is normal; our expectations rely upon the new normal.

Likely, if you know anything about Baudrillard's book you either a) attended graduate school in the humanities, or b) are major fan of the Wachowski Brothers. In an early scene in the Wachowski’s The Matrix, Thomas Anderson, a hacker a.k.a Neo, answers the door to Choi, a client who wishes to purchase some pirated software from Anderson/Neo. In fact, Choi tells us everything that we need to know to figure out the film—that Anderson, our “own personal Jesus Christ…need[s] to unplug”—yet we are so wrapped up in the ideology of Anderson’s reality that we fail to interpret the situation. When Anderson takes money from Choi and closes the door, we expect that he has gone to retrieve his pirated software.  This is in fact the case, but he does so from a book, a hallowed out book, a hollowed out copy of Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra.

At once, this homage to Baudrillard should strike us as apt and ironic—apt because The Matrix takes a constructed, false reality as its subject; ironic because this film is as stylized a piece of popular culture meant for mass appeal as I can conjure. And, yet during that lesson, something happened, something clicked for students.  One even said, “I didn’t realize that there was so much to The Matrix.”  And what is there to The Matrix?  Or, as Morpheus puts it, “What is The Matrix?” Well, we’ll have to get to that next time. 

To be continued…