Matrix

Author(s):  
Irina Aristarkhova

1. Matrix = Womb. 2. The Matrix is everywhere, it’s all around us, here, even in this 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 ... that you, like everyone else, was born into bondage ... kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste or touch. A prison for your mind. A Matrix. (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999) 3. What is Matrix? Simply ... the “big Other,” the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us. (S. Zizek, 1999) What is Matrix? In the past years, the notion of the Matrix has become dominant in figurations of cyberspace. It seems as if it is the most desirable, the most contemporary and fitting equation; however, its gendered etymology is rarely obvious. On the opposite, the gender of the matrix as a notion and term has been systematically negated in such disciplines as mathematics, engineering, film studies or psychoanalysis. It is necessary thus to explore and critique the Matrix as a most “fitting” metaphor in/for cyberspace that has conceived it (cyberspace) as a free and seamless space very much like the maternal body (Aristarkhova, 2002). The challenge today, therefore, is to reintroduce the maternal as one of embodied encounters with difference, to recover the sexual difference and gender in the notion of matrix with reference to cyberspace and information technologies that support it.

Author(s):  
Ekaterina V. Kuznetsova ◽  

As it noted by the researchers, the “Song of fate” accumulates painful thoughts of A.A. Blok about the fate of Russia and about his personal fate associat ed with the past, present and future of the Motherland. In addition to the ideological problems raised in it, the poem is interesting in an attempt to escape from the specifics of historical and national-cultural realities through their symbolization, combining the plans of life and being. The white house with a garden on the hill, in which the action of the play begins and the return to which is implied at the end, incorporates the most important features of Russia as a cultural, natural and spiritual space. The world of the estate is opposed by the space of the modern city and the big world of Russian open spaces. However, the estate for Blok is Russia the same. Therefore, Elena, the keeper of the estate, and Faina, the personalization of the world element, are two parts of one whole, as if the projection of an ideal Russia. The plot of the “Song of fate”, accord ing to D.M. Magomedova, I.S. Prikhodko, etc., is an artistic realization of the Gnostic myth of the captive Sophia, the Soul of the world. The imposition of the Gnostic myth in the “Song of fate” on the entire existing in Russian literature of the XIX century poetosphere of the estate leads to the creation of the author’s myth about Russia, the transformation of poetosphere in the mythopoetics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 155-172
Author(s):  
Nora Parr

While imagery and ideas from the past remain significant across much of Palestinian cultural production, there is an increasing push against a quagmire of language, where meaning is stuck in a past paradigm. Focusing on the work of Adania Shibli, Maya Abu al-Hayyat, and Mahmoud Amer, this chapter looks at contemporary writers who use their art to forge new words—a new language, a new framework for language—that better responds to life as they live it. In the process, existing structures of representation are forcefully discarded, though not entirely left behind. The chapter contends that the stories demand repudiation; a reckoning with the fact that somewhere between the Oslo Accords and the new millennium Palestine’s symbolic order and its lived world ceased to cohere.


Prospects ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 239-262
Author(s):  
Scott MacDonald

One of the primary reasons I became interested in film studies was the seeming open-endedness of the field. Cinema was new, I reasoned, and would continue to be new, unlike other academic fields, and particularly those devoted to historical periods: as a scholar and a teacher, I would face the future, endlessly enthralled and energized by the transformation of the potential into the actual. That my development as a film scholar/teacher increasingly involved me in avant-garde film seemed quite natural — a logical extension of the attraction of film studies in general: Avant-garde film was the newest of the new, the sharpest edge of the present as it sliced into the promise of the future. Scholars in some fields may empathize with the attitude I describe, but scholars in all fields will smile at its self-defeating implications: of course, I can see now how typically American my assumptions were — as if one could maintain the excitement of youth merely by refusing to acknowledge the past! Obviously, film studies, like any other discipline, is only a field once its history takes, or is given, a recognizable shape.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana María Aguilar López ◽  
Marta Miguel Borge

Our model of the world that we perceive within ourselves, our conscience, in short, our psychological balance is influenced by our surroundings. Part of the input to which we are exposed in this immediate environment is related to texts, self-managed discourse, which can also influence our internal model of the world; hence they are deserving of our attention. In the same way as the models of the world that we construct throughout our lives, reality is not static and also changes as time goes by. From a social point of view, we can see that the roles of women in modern-day society and the ways that those roles can be perceived today are a consequence of changes initiated in the past within different areas and in a prolonged process over time up until our day. With the aim of evaluating whether female drama has contributed to that change, we present an analysis in this paper of the play La Cinta Dorada [The Golden Ribbon] by María Manuela Reina, written and set in the 1980s, a decade that for Spain implied a more obvious abandonment of the most traditional conceptions of the role of women. In the analysis of the play, we see how the models of the world of the older people are counterposed with those of the younger people, a generational divide that is enriched with the gender difference, as we also analyze how the psychological structures of the female and male characters confront the clichés pertaining to another era in reference to such topics as success, infidelity, matrimony, and gender. The results of our analysis demonstrate how Reina responds to archaic conceptions, thereby inciting the audiences of the day to question their respective models of the world, especially, with regard to the role of the woman in society. 


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-95
Author(s):  
Diana Romanskaitė

Summary This article deals with the Matrix theory of subjectivity, gaze, and desire by feminist scholar Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. Matrixial framework is explored in comparison to Lacanian psychoanalysis. The essay denotes the differences between split Lacanian model of the subject and Matrixial subjectivity based on plurality and continuity. I argue that Lacanian model which grounds the subject in fundamental lack and loss of corporal reality is insufficient for explaining specifically feminine experience in terms of temporality and collective memory, whereas the Matrix theory provides a conceptual apparatus for positive female identification and alliances between the past and the present. Ettinger’s Matrixial model is applied in the analysis of the 2012 video The Meeting by contemporary Lithuanian artist Kristina Inčiūraitė. I claim that the mode of desire in The Meeting is based on Matrixial gaze, which allows to formulate memory as co-created by two partners who share archaic knowledge of the Real, grounded in common relation to female sexual difference and intrauterine condition. Therefore, the article interprets the imagery of the town of Svetlogorsk in the video as coemerged mental images that affect each of the partners. I conclude that the Matrix theory overcomes the phallocentrism of classical psychoanalysis, allowing to reformulate the subject in terms of connectivity, compassion, and abilities to process Other’s trauma through positive cultural change.


2005 ◽  
pp. 84-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Porokhovsky

The author pays special attention to the USA leading positions in the world economy. The basic significance of traditional industries, first of all manufacturing, in the structure of the American economy and its evolution are underlined. The article analyzes in detail the increasing role of services including finance. Information technologies create new economic structure and new quality of economic growth. A reader learns from the article about sustainable reproduction role of business cycle in the past and present.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 444-465
Author(s):  
Klara Goedecke

This article explores two Swedish TV shows centred on close, emotional friendships between men, Våra vänners liv (2010) [Our friends’ lives] and Boys (2015), as examples of postfeminism with a Swedish twist, inspired by Swedish ideologies of gender equality. Explicitly referring to feminism and gender equality, both shows explore what can be considered progressive masculine positions, drawing on ideas about sincerity, authenticity, emotionality and insight in men as central but not easily attained. I discuss portrayals of men as well as their friendships and explore the meanings of race, class and sexuality in the shows. Unlike many US and UK postfeminist representations of bumbling, ironically sexist anti-heroic men, efforts at reaching sincerity and authenticity characterize the protagonists of the shows. Similar to other postfeminist cultural representations, both shows portray political problems as individual ones or, alternatively, as issues that already have been dealt with. For instance, Boys portrays a posthomophobic and postracial Sweden where racism and homophobia are of the past, and both shows portray personal development in individual men aimed at becoming progressive as solutions to problems regarding gender justice. Both shows explore masculine positions that are available and unavailable, comprehensible and incomprehensible in contemporary Sweden, said to be one of the most gender-equal countries of the world. New masculine positions and intimacies between men, incorporating and referring to feminist or gender equality discourses, may be imagined and made available in shows like Våra vänners liv and Boys. However, such references and their consequences must be critically scrutinized.


Keruen ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
S.V. Ananyeva ◽  

The leading trends in the world literary process are summarized in the article based on the analysis of modern Kazakh, Belarusian and Finnish literature, which are characterized by new approaches to the interpretation of reality, reflecting the postmodern world view. Prose writers and poets build complex spatio-temporal relationships in literary texts, when pictures of the past replace the present, complementing and concretizing what has already happened. The transformation of the structure of the work of art, the chain of incredible coincidences and repetitions, the lyrical-autobiographical nature of the narrative, the metaphorical style, mythological imagery make it possible to fancifully interweave pictures of reality and fiction. The authors continue the experiment with the language and text, graphic design in different fonts, the inclusion of SMS messages, visuals, editing and clip series of images. A characteristic feature of the works is autobiography. The theme of family, childhood and gender policy is becoming a leading topic in modern Finnish and Belarusian literature. The literary text comes closer to the media text. Belarusian, Kazakh and Finnish literature are active participants in the world literary process. A postmodern vision of the world opens up new possibilities for creating characters of heroes and entering into dialogue thanks to new literary translations.


Author(s):  
Helena Gosling ◽  
Rowdy Yates

Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold: to reflect upon what the global therapeutic community (TC) movement has learnt from coronavirus and to consider how TCs will continue to adapt and evolve in a post-pandemic climate. Design/methodology/approach This is a viewpoint paper based on the authors’ participation in an international learning event whereby speakers from TCs from around the world spoke about how they adapted their services to overcome adversity. Findings The findings are usefully thought out as shelter, creativity, reintegration and employment, technology and roots. Based on the material discussed in the learning event, it would seem that the global TC movement has engaged in a process of looking to the past to move forward by drawing upon founding principles and prescriptions of the TC tradition, rooted in humanistic and indeed humanitarian responses to staff, client and sociocultural needs. Originality/value According to the author, this paper is one of the first attempts to capture how TCs from across the globe have responded to the threat of coronavirus.


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