SHAAAANNNN SHAN SHAN SHAN my essayyyy essayyyy
ENG 202
Prof. Feldstein
November 28, 2012
ISA and RSA in relation to Ideology in The Matrix
Each human lives on this planet within a set of beliefs, whether they be religious based, political based, or specifically culturally based, and we all govern ourselves to fit within those ideas. In each person’s lifetime, there may be a handful of instances where that person will stop to question the way they live their life, and the reasons behind the mold they’ve decide to fit into. Why does it feel so natural to comport ourselves within the rules of a mainstream society? Most people will just accept a way of living as it is, because it is the “normal” thing to do. Why is this specific lifestyle “ideal” and considered “normal”? Go to school, graduate, get married, go to church, have and raise children, work everyday, buy a house and a car, grow old, and then die. We are taught since birth to not question, to just follow the order that has been set. In the Marxist and Materialist Analysis it states that, “belief systems that underlie our actions and material lives, beliefs that are rarely reflected on and that structure our world and produce and reproduce social relationships” (74), is called ideology. Ideology, this theory that we are ruled by a system of ideas that are turned into idealistic beliefs, and the workings of the State Apparatuses, ISA and RSA, in their use of ideology, is the infrastructure of the world inside the movie The Matrix.
The setting of The Matrix is a city in the late nineteen nineties that appears to be no more or less than what any other 1990’s city would look like. People walk around going to work, or they are shopping, chatting, eating, driving, the same as it is in our time. Most of those people in the city, in that entire world, are not aware that they are actually just self projected images inside of a computer program called the Matrix. They do not know that their real bodies, their “actual selves”, are living in a forced catatonic state in the real world, being used as crops of fuel for the man made creatures of artificial intelligence that is now ruling the planet in the year twenty one ninety nine. “What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer generated dream world, built to keep us under control. In order to change a human being into this *holds up a battery*” (The Matrix). The Matrix is ideology. The people, or the minds of the people, are being given specific guidelines to live within while in this program. They are being controlled and molded to act and think the way the machines, the AI’s, want them to think, to keep people working and obedient. “Have you ever stood and stared at it? Marveled at its beauty, its genius. Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious” (The Matrix). In this “perfect” world there is a caste system, even though the people are not aware of it. If there is someone inside of this ideologically constructed world that shows signs of somehow becoming aware of the Matrix, the AI’s would dispatch an Agent, sentient programs, to take care of that person and keep the program running, almost like a personal police unit.
This distribution of power within the Matrix, between the AI’s and the people, is its type of caste system. It can be seen as using both a Repressive State Apparatus, as well as an Ideological State Apparatus. The Ideological State Apparatus, ISA, according to theorist Louis Althusser, is “a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions” (143). These institutions can be classified as churches, schools, within politics (which includes political Parties), families, and even in the media (radio, television news, etc.), and all of these are involved with the private domain, meaning it comes into contact with the individual person and not a large group of generalized people, like in the Repressive State Apparatus. The Repressive State Apparatus, the RSA, functions as a unified system within the public domain, which includes the police forces, courts, prisons, governments, etc., who use repression and violence, with only a little bit of ideology, to corral the people.
We do not get to delve completely into the mainframe of the city and its people within the Matrix. It may seem, at first, that the RSA is more in use than the ISA, by the fact that the movie opens on the Agents attacking Trinity while she is in the program, thus displaying more of a forceful nature than the ISA is involved in. But, if we step back from the repression that is happening to the group of people that take Neo out of the Matrix, overall the Matrix is a program completely created and governed within an ideological structure, with only some repressive force, for instance the sentient programs, that are used to corral people like Neo, Trinity and Morpheus who start to wonder at the world they live in. This is why the Matrix would be classified in the ISA more so than the RSA, even though it uses both.
Ideology has a key function within RSA and the ISA, and all three of those theories are mainly the basis for the Matrix. As stated previously, ideology is a system of beliefs people accept without much thought and conduct themselves according to those beliefs. The creation of ideology starts with one single idea, where soon more ideas that fit together with the original one are placed together to create a framework of ideas. When those ideas gain enough support they are raised up as an ideal, which, an ideal is defined as something “that is regarded as a standard or model of perfection or excellence”, or a perfect “goal”. There could be no Matrix, if there was no ideological structure that the humans could work with. “Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect world where none suffered? Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster, no one would accept the program, entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that as a species human beings define their reality through misery and suffering, that a perfect world we dreamed your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was re-designed to this” (The Matrix). This quote from one of the Agents from the movie shows that the ideology that they create has to be believable enough for the human mind to accept, and most know that there is no such thing as a “perfect world”.
The State Apparatus, which is termed as the “key elements of the ideological superstructure”, is the Marxist theory base for the Ideological State Apparatus and the Repressive State Apparatus. The State, the ISA and the RSA, all have theories involving a type of class dominion, in which a ruling, or “elite class” of people, have dominion to govern over common people. The common people, the everyday person, is classified as the “working class”. Unlike the ISA and RSA however, “the State, which is the State of the ruling class, is neither public nor private; on the contrary, it is the precondition for any distinction between public and private” (144). This type of class system is how ideology is created, and spread to the working class. The ruling classes of the state create the framework of ideas, and since they have power over the lower pats of society, can easily produce for the lower class what the “elite” people believe to be the ideal lifestyle from those ideas.
“Class conflict is necessary and inevitable from a Marxists standpoint, even if the individuals have taught to accept the status quo. Of course dominant groups invariably have a rationale to justify their positions of power” (Marxist and Materialist Analysis p. 77). This is seen in The Matrix through Morpheus and his group rising up from being nothing but fodder, the low class, against the Agents and the AI’s. Though, the Agents did have the reasoning for being in power, like it states in the Marxist theory. One of the Agents says to Morpheus, “..it was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization which is of course what this is all about. Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur…You had your time, the future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time” (The Matrix). Power on Earth has ended for the human race, it is now for the machines, the AI’s to rule up high. We lost all of our power, when, like the Agent said, they started thinking for us. But now there is a rebellion in the world, a relatively small amount of humans but just enough to keep the Agents on their feet since they have to worry about more and more people coming out of the Matrix due to the insubordination.
The Matrix might be designed to keep the people, the working class, as fuel for the AI’s, but it is still the real world to those people. Therefore, the AI’s have to create a realistically human governed world, and keep it with meticulous care. “The use of the State as an instrument of class dominion creates a further contradiction- the ruling class has to exercise its power in its own class interest at the same time as it maintains that its actions are for the good of all” (The German Ideology, p. 106, The Marxian Theory of the State p. 82). As stated before, the AI’s had to re-create the Matrix since the first one was too “perfect”, too ideal so to speak, and the human minds did not accept it as truth and woke up. If the people inside the Matrix feel as though they are being dictated upon, instead of the supposed “freedom” they have now, there will eventually be a rebellion inside the program itself, possibly leading up to them waking from the Matrix. It is a tentative balance the AI’s have to keep.
Since this is technically the “real world” for the people in the Matrix, this also means they each have a mind, and thoughts that are their own, as much as they are owned by the AI’s. “…ruling elites actually do not have a monopoly upon ideology. If they did, everyone would take the monopoly version of reality at face value and never questions it” (The Literary Theory Toolkit, Rapaport, p. 238). This piece of information is vital to the fact that, while most people do accept without thought the ideological world they live in, some with rebel against that world without leaving the Matrix. “But if these ruling class ideas are to gain acceptance as representing the “common interest” they have to be presented as abstract idealizations, as universal truths for all time. Consequently, these ideas have to be presented as if they have an autonomous existence of their own. Notions of “justice”, “right”, “freedom” are presented as if they have a meaning independent of any particular class interest” (The Marxian Theory of The State, Harvey, p. 82). For the AI’s to keep going with their world, they have to anticipate each “human” reaction to whatever they do in the program, otherwise things could most probably get complicated. Especially for the Americans inside the Matrix, who are used to a certain way of life and seem to be likely to rebel first against tyranny to keep their freedoms.
Once the ideology is instilled in the world, and people have accepted it as a lifestyle, unless some new drastic change occurs in their lives, the people will most likely keep a specific ideology forever. This is how we beget generations upon generations following “traditions”; they have to reproduce the reproduction of ideas to keep the ideology in place. The only way that ideology can keep being accepted by the people is to reproduce the means of production, to reaffirm the ideas in the next generation to reproduce
Each generation, no matter how much tradition is instilled in them, will always be a bit different than the one before it. The reason for this is because of the new ideas being given to them, being shown to them. New generations will take the past generations ideals and incorporate new ones to create a similar, but still different, ideology to live within. The reason this happens, the reason there is a new and different ideology, is because the ruling class changes. Since the ruling class is the one that makes the ideology for the people in the first place, it would only make sense that when it changes so would the “ideal” lifestyle. In this sense, it seems as though the AI’s of the Matrix change each generation or so or slightly tweak the ideology that they have in place to keep up with the new minds in the world. That seems to be what they would have to do, besides also remembering to keep their ideals as “human” as possible.
The complexity of The Matrix is astounding, between the structures of the program, the AI’s and the part that humanity plays in general in the movie. Ideology, Ideological State Apparatus and the Repressive State Apparatus are all concepts intertwined with each other, since ideology is a necessary factor in both theories, and each are made more complicated with their role in this movie. While this essay played with the basic roles ISA, RSA and ideology have in this movie, and even in our own world, there is still much to be seen inside the Matrix that was not here. Ideology does not only govern over the “many”, it is specific to the individual as well, even over the AI’s. They might be artificial intelligence created by man, but they still follow an ideological society as well; humans are food used to keep the AI’s alive so that they can keep their ‘power’ in the world longer and longer. To be able to do that, to keep that ideal going, they have to govern themselves in specific ways, just like the humans. No one can escape ideology, for once you leave one, you will soon find yourself following another without even realizing it.
Works Cited
1. Hall, Donald. “Literary and Cultural Theory: From Basic Principles to Advanced Applications, Marxist and Materialist Analysis”.New York: Houghton Mifflin Company
2. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Aparatuses”.
3. Harvey, David. The Marxian Theory of State. http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/politics/research/hmrg/activities/documents/HarveyAntipode1976.pdf
4. Rapaport, Herman. “The Literary Theory Toolkit: A Compendium of Concepts and Methods, Tools for Social Analysis”.West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2011