#thesubject

What is the self? How is that different than the subject? How do these answers apply to our lives and contemporary culture? 

The Matrix is a film centered around the idea of what a post-human world looks like; it offers us a bleak perspective on the future, and compels us to reevaluate our existence. But that’s going too far ahead- let’s take a look back in time to a different theory; humanism. Mansfield states in Subjectivity that “things and events are now understood on the level of the pulsing, breathing, feeling individual self.” But how can we define the self? Is Frankenstein’s creature a “self”? Or a subject? To start, let’s look at how to define the subject for ourselves. Mansfield says that our “interior lives inevitably seems to involve other people,” meaning that we are subjects to, and subjects of our environment. This demonstrates that everything around us helps to form our worldview, our sense of self, and what fundamentally makes up our characters. Frankenstein’s creature is a subject. He is a subject of the world’s fear and violence towards him, and also a subject to, in part, Frankenstein’s wishes and decisions. Victor is his father and creator, and the creature is a subject of Victor, whether or not either of them is pleased about that. “Subjectivity is primarily an experience, and remains permanently open to inconsistency, contradiction and unself-consciousness,” all of these ideas are present in Frankenstein, from the creature’s journey through his “childhood” and education, to the way Victor is plagued throughout the novel by the creature and his own mind alike. Each is a subject to the other, and both therefore, clearly have subjectivity. 

The self is different in that it begins with any thought. Imagine looking around at your surroundings and having any observation not begin, even unconsciously, with the word “I” or “I think.” This is the basis for the belief in any autonomous self. That our perception of the world is the reason why we have a consciousness separate from anyone else. This Enlightenment ideal of the “I think, therefore I am,” is flawed, however, and The Matrix throws this in sharp relief, with the idea that the world around us, everything we perceive, can and is, a construct. What, and how, could we then possibly be individuals? What happens to our sense of self at all? If it is shown to be just an illusion, our entire world, everything we know to be true, where do we go from there?

First look at The Subject

A new trailer has been released for The Subject, which is set to release in 2018.