ABSTRACT
Until now, we have considered the matrix as a sign of enframement. Part I dealt with, first, the general principle of technological development and its implications for the way in which we confront reality through technology (Heidegger’s withdrawal from Being), and second, the particular attributes of media technologies which facilitate technology’s enframing qualities in a particularly powerful way – as their very name implies media technologies mediate our culture. We have seen in Kittler’s work, for example, how cities have come to constitute what are effectively large-scale prototypical computers. In Part II we have traced the im/material tension that is at the heart of digital matters and the paradoxical nature of a withdrawal from reality by means of very real technological artefacts. We have seen how this tension is reflected in various pressures of urban life. Within cities, detectives, flâneurs and cyberpunks all represent emblematic figures of the attempt to impose human meaning on the increased pace and scale of the flows that result from the combined effect of the media and urban im/materiality. At its most extreme, the emblematic confrontation with technology’s withdrawal was portrayed in Chapter 7 in the dystopian excesses of the Matrix as an ambiguous place residing in the gap (and The Gap) of the im/material. In the blockbuster eponymous film it is the suffocating grid into which we are plugged for nourishment and exploitation, like human fuel cells.
