"Free Your Mind": The Postmodern Pauline Message in The Matrix
James K.A. Smith, Professor of Philosophy, Calvin College

[This talk was originally delivered at Trinity Western University in Vancouver, British Columbia in the fall of 2003.]

I. Introduction: The Matrix

Before I invite you back to first-century Colosssae, come back with me for a moment — before Reloaded and Revolutions — to a central scene from The Matrix. Trinity has invited Neo to the decaying urban site of the Hotel Lafayette to meet none other than Morpheus. Neo is full of questions, and as they sit in cracked-leather burgundy chairs, Morpheus asks:

MORPHEUS

Do you believe in fate, Neo?

NEO

No.

MORPHEUS

Why not?

NEO

Because I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life.

MORPHEUS

I know exactly what you mean.

Let me tell you why you are here. You are here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain. But you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life — that there’s something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad, driving you to me. It’s this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?

NEO

The matrix.

MORPHEUS

Do you want to know what it is?

Neo nods, anxiously. The leather creaks as he leans back.

MORPHEUS

The Matrix is everywhere; it's all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work or go to church or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

NEO

What truth?

MORPHEUS

That you are a slave, Neo. That you, like everyone else, was born into bondage ... kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, or taste, or touch. A prison for your mind.

Outside, the wind batters a loose pane of glass.

MORPHEUS

Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.

What Morpheus is challenging Neo to do is step back from his immersion in the world of his experience — to disengage himself from his absorption the routines of the middle class in order to see something disturbing: that he is a slave. Despite all of his illusions of freedom, despite his distaste for "fate" and the idea that someone else is in control, in fact Neo is being controlled by others. The very shape of his life has been programmed because someone else controls his mind. This controlling of his imagination ultimately enslaves his heart.

But of course, this is science fiction! A nice thought experiment, but not something that could really be true. Certainly, we aren’t being controlled and manipulated in this way. Or are we?

I would like to invite you to hear two people who think otherwise: in the twentieth century, the so-called postmodernist Michel Foucault; in the first century, a minister of the Gospel — the Apostle Paul.

II. Postmodernism: Foucault

For Foucault, at the root of our most cherished and central institutions is a network of power relations. The same is true of our most celebrated ideals; at root, Foucault claims, "knowledge" and "justice" reduce to power. While we moderns — especially we moderns who grew up on "Schoolhouse Rock" — were shaped by the maxim of Francis Bacon proclaiming that "knowledge is power," then Foucault’s postmodern axiom is that "Power is knowledge." By this he means to emphasize the inextricable relationship between knowledge and power. "Knowledge," or what counts as "knowledge," is not neutrally determined.¹ Instead, what counts as knowledge is constituted within networks of power — social, political, and economic.

In his best known book, Discipline and Punish, Foucault documents the formation of what he will call a "disciplinary society" — the primary goal of which is the creation of the "individual." So the goal of a disciplinary society, and the institutions within that society, is the formation of individuals by mechanisms of power. Society makes individuals in its own image, and the tools for such manufacturing are the disciplines of power. For Foucault — and this is close to the heart of the "theory" of society offered in Discipline and Punish — power is necessary and constitutive of society. All that changes are the mechanisms and technologies of power. One could not have a society that is not fundamentally characterized by power relations.

So while Discipline and Punish is a history of the development of prisons and penal practice, it also sketches the basic structure of society as a whole — what Foucault calls "the generalization of discipline." The goal of society, like the penitentiary, is to create "docile" and "useful" subjects — of the state, of capitalism, etc. (DP 216-217, 220-221). The disciplinary society forms individuals into what it wants them to be: docile, productive consumers who are obedient to the state. Like Thomas Anderson within the matrix, we are all being controlled in order to serve a specific goal or end. We are, in a sense, "slaves" to a system — "prisoners" of society.

This is why Foucault will suggest that the modern "penitentiary" is a product of a disciplinary society, rather than a disciplinary society being the reflection of penal practice. In other words, when we look at the modern penitentiary, we are looking at ourselves, seeing our society reflected in a mirror, as it were. The modern prison will only codify and localize the generalization of discipline that has already been effected throughout the social body. It was not that the prison came to be a model for society; rather, the disciplinary mechanisms of society "colonized the legal institution" (DP 231). If Foucault is documenting the "birth of the prison," it is delivered from the matrix of a disciplinary society already in place. As an "apparatus for transforming individuals," the penitentiary "merely reproduces, with a little more emphasis, all the mechanisms that are to be found in the social body" (DP 233) — in the military, schools, hospitals, and factories.² As he concludes, "this prison came from elsewhere" (256). And later he concludes that the prison "continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline" (DP 302-303). It’s not that society came to mimic prisons; rather, prisons were microcosmic crystallizations of what was characteristic of society itself. In modern society, discipline is ubiquitous.³

All of this, for Foucault, is aimed at normalization. Foucault offers studies of all kinds of "practices" (from bells ringing to get us to move according to timetables to the use of negative stimuli to get us to stop doing something) that shape and mold human beings to act in a certain way — to be a certain kind of person. The thing that Foucault is absolutely right about is the fact that this works! This happens. Disciplinary mechanisms in our society do make humans into certain kinds of people who are aimed at particular goals. For instance, many Americans are defined by the primary goal of consumption. They stake their identity on their material possessions — on labels, on objects of luxury, and on the never-ending process of keeping up with the trends. If we look at the way upper-middle-class America spends its time and money, we have to conclude that their ultimate goal is to be faithful consumers. Now, how did they get to be that way? How did they become those kind of people? Of course, this isn’t simple, but we could easily identify several "disciplinary practices" that form human beings into these consuming animals. First, the very success of capitalism depends upon a consuming culture as market — and particularly a culture that wants ever new products (otherwise the market becomes quickly saturated, and the possibilities of profits quickly reduce). So we have a culture — or at least a class within culture — that has a vested interest in seeing a society of consumers. So how will they create this population of consumers? One of the primary ways has been the advent of mass media, which, from its inception, has been aimed at marketing. We must understand, for instance, that television programs were basically invented in order to get an audience for commercials. So the majority of mass media is undertaken as a medium for creating an audience for advertising who will eventually become a market of consumers. Marketing, then, is driven by investing products with social, sexual, and even religious value, which makes them something much more than they are. In other words, marketing capitalizes on structural human desires for meaning and transcendence and presents products and services as that which will satisfy these human longings. It then utilizes the tools of disciplinary practice to almost "inject" these values into the very character of human beings — internalizing the values so that they become part of the person. By using repetition, the use of images, and other strategies — all of which communicate truths in ways that are other than cognitive or propositional — marketing forms us into the kind of persons who want to buy beer to have meaningful relationships, or buy a car to be respected, or buy the latest thing to come along simply to satisfy the desire that has been formed and implanted in us. Like the neural active simulation that is the matrix, these desires are communicated by a world of images and through a range of practices that teach the body, as it were. The "covertness" of the operation is also that which makes it so powerful: The truths get inscribed in us through the powerful instruments of imagination and ritual.

III. Pauline: The Colossian Warning

I have been struck at how much Foucault’s analyses echo concerns of Paul in the New Testament. In writing to Colossian Christians in the first century, Paul is especially concerned about a heresy infecting Colossae — what he calls "the philosophy" that is based upon "the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ" (2:8). I think we can understand this if we think about it in terms of allegiance, and that to which we are called to pledge our allegiance and ultimate commitment. Broadly speaking, allegiance involves intense commitment, and it is directed toward a particular end or ideal. In short, allegiance is "teleological" — pointed toward a telos. In other words, allegiance serves a master. Ultimately, every human being pledges allegiance to some ultimate master. And all of our practices point to an allegiance: What we do, the actions we undertake, are ultimately in service of some end, some master. The Colossian "philosophy" suggested that the Christian could pledge allegiance to Jesus and … other masters. In other words, the danger was idolatry, but not the idolatry of substitution; rather, it was the idolatry of addition — the notion that one could pledge one’s heart to two masters: Jesus and pagan ideals, Jesus and the empire, Jesus and a legalistic "law." Thus the core of the Colossian heresy was a message of accommodation: that one could broker a compromise between the call to follow Christ and the claims of what amounted to competing "gods."

In the face of this, Paul’s warning is clear: allegiance to Christ admits of no compromise or accommodation. The resounding message of the epistle is "Christ alone!" Radical discipleship requires that all of our practices are ultimately motivated by our allegiance to Christ. If our allegiance is to anything other than Christ, then the Scriptures describe that as idolatry. Note that this doesn’t mean only pledging allegiance to something instead of Christ. As we see from the book of Colossians, idolatry also occurs when we pledge allegiance to something in addition to Christ. So the key question for radical discipleship is, "In what spheres of life have I failed to make Christ Lord?" And I’m not just talking about little corners of your heart where you don’t feel religious enough. I mean: What actions and practices do I undertake that show I’m pledging allegiance to a consumerist culture? Or to the American empire? What does my voting tell me about my allegiance? What does my spending tell me about my allegiance? What does where I live tell me about my allegiance? What does my sexual practice tell me about my allegiance? What do my friendships tell me about my allegiance? There is not a single sphere of life or action that should not fall under allegiance to Christ. (And this isn’t just an individual question: It is a question that the church needs to ask itself. For instance, in what way has the church simply mimicked consumer culture with the proliferation of Christian "products"? In what way does the notion of a "purpose-driven life" accommodate the Gospel to American pragmatism?)

Early Christians were seen as a threat by the empire of Rome because Rome saw that authentic Christian practice subverted the authority of the empire. While the Christian could render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s, he could not give to Caesar his heart or ultimate allegiance; that belonged to Christ alone. Is our Christian commitment characterized by similar resistance and subversion? In our practices, do we resist the "powers" that would call for our allegiance? Or have we fallen prey to the Colossian heresy that suggests that there can be a compromise — that we can pledge allegiance to Jesus and …? Are we under the control of the matrix of competing gods — the idols of consumerism, capitalism, militarism, and nationalism? Have we allowed ourselves to be molded into "normal" North Americans — and thereby lost our souls?

If you’ll permit the analogy, Christ is our Morpheus: He has come to "free our minds" from captivity to competing gods. But there is a sense in which we need to go through the difficulty of taking the red pill. We need to undertake the difficult, disorienting process of disentangling our involvement with these competing gods — and grapple with the uncomfortable reality that what we’ve come to accept as "normal" is, in fact, idolatrous. Thanks be to God that, unlike Morpheus, Christ empowers us with the grace of the Holy Spirit.

1) This is why I suggest elsewhere that Foucault’s "genealogy" shares something in common with presuppsitionalist approaches to epistemology that emphasize the role of "control beliefs" [Wolterstorff] in the constitution of knowledge.

2) Foucault analyzes these other social institutions especially in chapter "Docile Bodies" (III.1).

3) This is powerfully illustrated in another film, Brazil.