by Matthew Fouts

Created on: October 28, 2008

The feature film, The Matrix, presented a dystopian vision of life in the future. Mankind, it seems, has been subjugated by a race of intelligent machines. Seeing the humans as a useful power source, the machines keep millions of people in storage and suck the energy out of them like batteries. They keep their captives docile by creating a virtual world for them to live in. Every human is plugged into the matrix at birth. While their bodies are encased in huge collective storage units, their minds are fed signals that tell them they are living their life in a typical human city. It strikes me, as I think about it, that the concept behind The Matrix is very similar to Michael Reddy's conduit metaphor, as discussed is his article, The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in our Language About Language.

I was first exposed to Reddy's conduit metaphor and toolmaker's paradigm in a class on the rhetoric of prose composition. I found the concept immediately attractive in that it seemed to clearly explain the tendency of communication toward breakdown in a way that other theories did not. A great deal of Reddy's argument seemed self evident to me and I was surprised to learn that my fellow students didn't feel the same way. They had a problem with Reddy that seemed largely based on the fact that his metaphor was fantastical and unrealistic. In particular, they objected to the fact that the story included an evil magician.

The thing that surprised me in particular about their rejection of Reddy was the fact that a large number of them had accepted very similar theories by other critics, specifically, James Berlin and Carolyn Miller. For example, Berlin, in his essay, Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories, agrees with Reddy on several points, including the power of language to determine how we view the world. He says "Rather than truth being prior to language, language is prior to truth and determines what shapes truth can take. Language does not correspond to the 'real world.' It creates the 'real world' by organizing it, by determining what will be perceived and not perceived" [emphasis mine] (Berlin 265-6)
Consider the following quote by Berlin:

Classical Rhetoric considers truth to be located in the rational operation of the mind, Positivist Rhetoric in the correct perception of sense impressions, and Neo-Platonic Rhetoric within the individual, attainable only through an internal apprehension. In each case knowledge is a commodity situated

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