(Pic from www.ew.com)
So, I was reading some of the 60s stuff last night, mostly the bits about periodisation, and whether the 60s can be identified as a specific period of history. One of the exercises was to read an excerpt from a book about 60s counter-culture, see below. Now, apart from actually mentioning the word 'matrix', it almost reads like some sort of deconstruction of 'The Matrix'.
[...] But from my own point of view, the counter culture, far more than merely ‘meriting’ attention, desperately requires it, since I am at a loss to know where, besides among these dissenting young people and their heirs of the next few generations, the radical discontent and innovation can be found that might transform this disoriented civilization of ours into something a human being can identify as home. They are the matrix in which an alternative, but still excessively fragile future is taking shape. Granted that alternative comes dressed in a garish motley, its costume borrowed from many and exotic sources – from depth psychiatry, from the mellowed remnants of left-wing ideology, from the oriental religions, from Romantic Weltschmerz [agony over the state of the world], from anarchist social theory, from Dada and American Indian lore, and, I suppose, the perennial wisdom. Still it looks to me like all we have to hold against the final consolidation of a technocratic totalitarianism in which we shall find ourselves ingeniously adapted to an existence wholly estranged from everything that has ever made the life of man an interesting adventure.
If the resistance of the counter culture fails, I think there will be nothing in store for us but what anti-utopians like Huxley and Orwell have forecast – though I have no doubt that these dismal despotisms will be far more stable and effective than their prophets have foreseen. [...]
From Theodore Roszak, Preface to The Making of a Counter Culture (1970 edition)
I love the matrix line - "They are the matrix in which an alternative, but still excessively fragile future is taking shape." I really like the idea that the counter-culture is the matrix, rather than the society that the counter-culture is opposed. It makes me wonder if the Wachowski brothers had read this passage, because it really does fill your mind with fantastical ideas!
I think I must be going mad! This is what happens when you study in the dead of night... Things become something else! 'There is no counter-culture!'
