Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

The Good Life: Understanding Plots Power Relations, Unknown-1, 102,…

- - - - In essence, Sadism takes away other peoples' freedom. I will call this "authoritarian action." On a societal scale we see authoritarian actions when people are denied free elections— intentionally limiting others' ability to democratically rule their society—, when bosses suppress workers’ rights, or when people are literally attacked— taking away someone's freedom to exist as they were. These sadistic actions exist in the guise of ‘freedom from’ a monarchical institution—. When authoritarian crimes are made, they are made in the name of ‘fine’ institutions such as the free market or human liberties. When sadistic-authoritarian actions are made they are often definitionally obscured. This very act takes away peoples’ freedom to understand the world they live in.
        Sade indiscriminately committed his crimes. It was ‘other people’ which he hated and wanted to terminate. The action is entirely based on limiting other people for the pleasure of oneself (and getting ahead). Where the relationship of the power dynamic is not to change the actor but to always change the acted upon.
    - - The definition of masochism is "the tendency to derive pleasure, especially sexual gratification, from one's own pain or humiliation." I am interested in the non-sexual pleasure which is derived from pain. So, the question—, 'what pleasure can one derive from pain?'
        Paradoxically, the pleasure masochism derives is a certain type of control over our actions. This is to say, masochism gives us the ability to gain control by giving control to someone else. When we give up our control we also give up our agency. Any forms of guilt or responsibility which we might have is transferred to someone else. Therefore, Masochism provides us with an uninhibited reality.
        Psychoanalytically, our superego is turned off and therefore we no longer need to negotiate between our ego and id. In short, masochistic actions outsource our super ego to someone else. What is right or wrong, what is ethical, is totally given up when we masochistically submits it to another person (or institution). We are then able to conform to the norms of our surroundings without considering our place in the world.
        Let's consider some societal masochistic examples. When people cut themselves they take control of a situation which seems controllable. When they are in unending painful and distressing emotional states, by cutting themselves they get to choose when it hurts—instead of it always hurting. In short, the pain exists only when they choose, this is a way of managing the pain.
        Psychologically, masochism is a product of the internalisation of the self-object / self-image. If I have a negative self-image of myself, as in I think I am undeserving of love or I am just problematic, it only makes sense to hurt ‘that person’ because they deserve it. Here we can see a disassociation between the self-concept and the self-object. The pain is legitimized when we put on a ‘double consciousness’, the opinion of society and act in its name.
        Let's consider a ‘double consciousness’ when it is projected by a love-object (a person or thing we love). If I am in a bad relationship with my parents, I will project the bad relationship onto myself in order to justify my bad parents. I need to believe that I am unlovable. For example, the reason my dad beat me when he was drunk because of something I did, not him. I must internally subject the anger and sadness I feel as a way of making sense of this happening because I have not divorced my identity from my parents. I receive security, comfort, pleasure when I protect myself from a situation which I cannot cope with (having to divorce myself from my family) by disassociating myself into a self-concept and a self-object to overcome the problem of inherent badness of my parents.
        
        A Small Place is an essay by Jamaica Kincaid which critiques the tourism industry and how it has affected her home country Antigua. Particularly she writes that the tourism industry personally alienates the people of the country by introducing the country as a tourist destination, an identity which makes money. She continues to speak of the tangible exploitation which is involved as the black people of the island are not compensated for their ‘exotic’ role in making the island a destination for tourists.
        Kincaid especially draws issue with the ownership which the tourism industry has over the island economy and how if one wants to be successful on the island, it is largely dictated by the industry itself. So, in other words, one has to adopt the “double consciousness” of the western industry in order to partake in it. That is to say that in order to experience wealth and prosperity in one's home country, they actively have to play a role in destroying it. One has to adopt two consciousnesses, their person desires to have a better life and at the same time play a role in making their life worse, because this is what is required of western countries in trying to turn the island into a tourist destination-commodity.
        
        A Small Place
        
        Parasite
        
        Parasite is a movie about a family, the Kim’s, who are working class Koreans who take up assistant work for a very wealthy family, the Parks. The Kim’s get their assistant work jobs by cheating out a woman who used to work for the family. The Park family is very nice however they do not realize that characteristics which are inherent to their wealth actively abuse the Kim’s until they reach a breaking point. Because the Parks have the Kim's salaries as leverage, there is an invisible level of service which the Kim’s succumb to out of fear of poverty. This is further elevated by the lack of safety net which the family is offered by their society
        
        The Kim’s experience the ultimate masochism because they have to monitor the Park family’s every move to try and make them happy. This monitorization causes them to absolutely submit themselves under the wealth of the Parks. Towards the end of the movie, it is revealed that the previous housekeeper kept her husband in the basement so that he wouldn't be homeless. There is a very cinematic moment where the husband, who has gone completely mad, turns on the lights for the family in the house. The Park’s think that it is automatic lighting but in reality it is a man obsessed with serving them even though he is unnoticed. In the final scene it becomes apparent that the husband in the basement has become obsessed with Mr.Kim, expressing immense masochism and false consciousness
    - - In the play Antigone by Sophocles, Creon is forced to sentence Antigone to death because she has chosen to bury Polyneices against Creon’s orders. Creon exhibits the authoritarian personality because he sadistically sentences Antigone to death and masochistically sacrifices someone he loves in the name of the power which he holds. Creon is logically justified in his actions insofar as he is consistent with the utilization of his power, however his authoritarian action is based in his desire to make sense of a difficult situation.
        Creon clearly loves Antigone and does not want to kill her, however if he were to follow through with his he would contradict and thus invalidate the world which he understands. For Antigone to live is for him to no longer exist as the benevolent power which he sees himself as. Furthermore, if his identity was no longer his identity... This is a result which Creon cannot come to terms with. This result necessitates the masochistic sentiment which Creon has for systems of power. Creon is unable to cope with the changing world and so submits his super ego to the law book in order to get himself out of a situation which is difficult. As we can see, Creon exhibits the Authoritarian Personality in the sentencing of Antigone.
      - Antigone
    - - Emma Bovary, in the novel Madame Bovary, exemplifies the refusal to submit to other people’s authority. Madame Bovary is quite the sadist in relation to the role in which her society places her. She restricts and takes away the freedom her community thinks it has over her. She wants to be with other men besides Charles for superficial reasons. She does not love other people, and she does not want to be loved insofar as it prevents her from practicing her social mobility.
      - However, I do not consider Madame Bovary to be strictly related to sade. Madame Bovary, while not submissive to authority, is very submissive to the hegemonic idea of bourgeois status. What makes Emma frustrated with her life is its lack of excitement. Emma wants to transcend her class and she doesn’t so much as to think about what anyone has to say about it. I choose to place Emma in the authoritarian personality because insofar as she sadistically impresses herself upon other people, she does this in the name of social mobility and bourgeois relationships, concepts she submissively fetishizes insofar as it is the most important thing which she can achieve.
      - While Emma does not come across as a fascist or anything of the sort (she is not a bad person) we can see her disregard for her society as extremely liberating and honest, however she does impress upon others and submits to ideas in a very similar way in which the authoritarian personality represents mobility and power
      - Madame Bovary
- - - - “The Big Other”': Capitalism is extraordinarily good at creating “others.” According to Jaques Lacan, The Big Other is “an otherness which transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification.” In OTHER words, the Big Other is a thing which is characterised by its foreignness yet still cannot be directly identified, the big other belongs in our abstract imaginations. I am now going to connect Fromm’s ‘freedom from’ to Lacan’s ‘Big Other.’ Let's consider how American society practices the Big Other.
        Slavey, at the beginning, was justified because it was a ‘freedom’ from a worse continent, for slaves. However, slavery was much worse than living in Africa.
        Once we abolished slavery, it was a freedom from a soceity the enslaved other human beings. However we created Jim Crow laws which prevented black people from being first or second class citizens.
        After we got rid of these Jim Crow laws, there was still segregation because we were afraid of the incompatible nature of black people and white people in society. However this only justified overt racism when black people were in places where they were not allowed to be.
        Once we got rid of segregation, we found a way to think of black people as uncivilized, dangerous, and uneducated.
        As we can see, when the “big other” is abstracted as something which we need to find a freedom from, we just end up transforming society into a different society that is also bad. When ‘freedom from’ is practiced, maybe certain things are made better, however these changes are marginal and really prevent us human beings from living how we want to live.
        So when we consider freedoms that are merely just negations of “Big Others” we find ourselves in a world that is progressing, however, at what cost? How long do we need to wait until we live in the egalitarian society which we want to live in? Lacan’s “Big Other” illuminates how certain freedoms are not as free as they appear.
        
        A Raisin in the Sun: In the play, the Younger family’s anxiety on what to do with the Mr. Younger’s will-money and how the family should utilize the means they have in determining their future is an example of the Big Other. At the end of the play, the Younger family uses the money to move into a better, all-white, neighborhood. There are many caveats and issues with this goal/decision. Firstly, it is quite tangible that in the mid 20th century, a white neighborhood is safer and better off than a black neighborhood. However this general understanding is from a white person’s perspective. The Younger family’s decision creates a big other for the white community, and at the same time creates a big other for them as well. They are anxious to move into a likely racist white town but they are fearful of the big other that is staying in the neighborhood they are in and suffering the consequences of being in that certain part of town.
        The dialogue and ongoing conversation throughout the entire play speak to the intangible and abstract concepts which are at play in trying to understand wealth, race, and prosperity in mid-century America. It becomes very clear, especially in the last scene when the family moves, that the family is making a choice based on certain abstract and non concrete reasons to move to where they are going. Here we can see a major sociological issue that I laid out in America’s history with the treatment of black people. While there is a freedom from a certain place because of the “Big Other” it represents, the misguidedness which is spawned out of the decision for freedom can just lead to greater problems. The skeptic ends the play with the understanding that the money which the Younger family used to better their lives was wasted and might have made their lives worse than before.
        
        Life & Dept
        
        In the documentary Life and Debt, at about 12 minutes into the documentary the documentary transfers from the ex-prime minister or president of Jamaica speaking on the IMF to a historical account of the IMF and then to a tour bus which drives through “Queens Road” which is littered with American restaurant chains
        
        I believe that this switch of perspectives that is, the jamacian people (ex-president), the idea of the jamacian people (the bus), and the absence of jamaican people (the IMF’s history), portrays the “Big Other” that I have involved with ‘Freedom From’ on a global scale. The collage of scenes provide us with two contradictory ‘others’ that exist behind the image of Jamaica. The film shows a globalized harmony which ‘others’ its stark opposition to the reality of the natural beauty of the island
        
        This feature of perspective change exposes the dichotomous nature of two different ‘others’ by displaying how both freedoms actively avoid and contradict each other. By showing the commodification of a country in the lens of the social relations which cause it, we begin to see how the commodity is an extraction and exploitation of the laborers who brought it about. And by utility of the history of the IMF, the aesthetic is doomed to fail regardless of Jamaica profit. This is because the IMF loan that was given to the country with the intention that it couldn’t be paid
        
        A Raisin in the Sun
      - "Freedom from" is an escape from something without a specific destination. Freedom from is the ‘running away’ which we often strive for. Let’s consider ‘freedom from’ on a sociological scale. Freedom from is the type of freedom we abstract when we are running away from 'something'. It is the freedom we strive for when we discern that it is worth running away from a situation, as such. In other words, when we consider freedom we are actually saying that we want the negation of what we have now. For example, “by golly I do not want to not live under a king. Therefore I must escape and I do not particularly care about what is on the other side, I just know it will be better.” As we can see, ‘freedom from’ does not consider the implications of freedom because it is unproductive.
        We often see ‘freedom from’ in our daily popular politics. When someone says that they want socialism in the USA (a ‘freedom to’ achieve socialism), the critique is: “no we must be free from the plagues of socialism!” The critique changes the conversation from a freedom to, to a freedom from. It is no longer a question on what we need to chase but rather just escaping the worst scenario.
        Although the stance that socialism should not exist in America is wrong, there is a productivity in the argument of ‘freedom from.’ However, the freedom which this freedom creates is often unclear. What I mean is, if we escape a bad situation, there is productivity in the sense that change is happening (or not happening). However progress for progress sake ends up not being that great. In reality, freedom should be aimed at clearly articulated goals which we need to strive for.
        Imagine, instead of escaping the monarchy as such, what if there was a revolution only to centralise and strengthen the farming and working class. This situation would have probably looked a whole lot different than American capitalism or Stalin’s Soviet Union.
        We can say the same about the Chinese reintegration camps. This freedom from, “we have to purge their old way of thinking, that feudal, capitalistic, islamic thought” is clearly misguided. If the goals of these camps were to merely integrate these people in giving them good jobs in society and allowing them to retain their culture while still being understood in chinese culture is a proper ‘freedom to’. When ‘freedom from’ maintains freedom in the most abstract and escapist form, we need to consider if the means justify the ends. This is freedom, but it is the wrong kind of freedom.
    - - What is the freedom to? Freedom to is the creative freedom one is able to express when there is a minimal influence of external factors upon one’s individual actions. Freedom to is not radical freedom. It is a coherent way of living which coincides with certain understandings of
        human nature.
        Erich Fromm describes freedom to as the negation of capitalism's restriction of ‘the good things in life.’ These are things such as the time to make art, or the time to invest in things we cannot afford such as vacations. These freedoms are creative acts which allows us to express ourselves. Without the freedom to, we find ourselves in experiences which are limited by a society which is not run for the betterment of people but for the profit of few.
        The point is not only to eliminate these barriers. The point of freedom to is to discover and work within oneself and find out what is inherently pleasing to our beings. Freedom to is the creation of systems of ideas, governance, and etc. A world which allows us to be free insofar as our actions are negotiated with the best possible outcomes and intentions of our society. The uncompromising future for this state of mobility.
      - The Great Gatsby
        
        T
        
        he Great Gatsby: Gatsby’s attempt to win over Daisy is an example of Erich Fromm’s “freedom to”. In the novel, Gatsby is born a poor midwestern boy and falls in love with Daisy before he goes off to WWI. Upon his return he does not return to Daisy because he is insecure about how poor he is. He does not think he is worth enough to treat her well. So Gatsby spends the next decade making millions of dollars in order to win her over. He moves to New York City and buys a home across the water from Daisy’s home. He throws extravagant parties every night just to get her to notice him. He goes above and beyond everything that was ever expected of him. Gatsby achieves the American Dream
        
        However, Gatsby does not care for the American Dream or the money which he earned in the bootlegging business. Gatsby wants something that is impossible. He wants to go back in time and have Daisy fall in love with him again before she fell in love with her unloving husband Tom Buchanan. Gatsby is a tragic hero because his mission was doomed to fail before it even began. According to Fromm’s framework. Gatsby created his world and achieved such extravagance because he only wanted one thing, the freedom to love daisy. In order to achieve this feat he had to achieve the impossible (and it was impossible)
        
        The destruction of so many other characters was the cost to Gatsby’s desire. Gatsby was perfectly loving and he wanted everything, and this is why we admire him. However what The Great Gatsby teaches us is that even the perfect intentions, the perfect freedom, still fall consequence to the realities of the world. The Great Gatsby is retrospectively my favorite book from this class because of the contradiction which is expressed according to Fromm’s framework of freedom
    - - The Dispossessed is the ultimate example of the dichotomy between freedom from and freedom to. The book is very long and incredibly interesting. However I want to focus on the difference betwen the two major planet-powers in the novel, Anarres and Urras.
      - Anarres is an anarchist society without any permanent settlements and its only industry is mining, a natural resource which they use for their own means. Anarres’ people do not live for anything in particular except for a general idea of radical freedom which is outlined by their pretty simple political philosophy. Nobody has any special titles, such as doctor or Mr/Mrs, because they are hierarchical structures
      - Uras on the other hand has incredibly specific capitalistic goals. They see Anarres as their property, as their mining colony, and want the main character Shevek to make technological apparatus which would allow them to achieve total monopoly over the galaxy. Uras, as opposed to many modern capitalist states, has a very coherent idea of what they want, global domination. It is a freedom to! Now, it sounds paradoxical because freedom is supposed to be the best possible freedom. What strikes Uras as an incredibly terrible place to be is that it abided by a capitalist ethic that is based on exploitation rather than anything real, such as Marx’s species-being, the idea that we are inherently productive, creative, individuals who are also caring and able to help each other out. I believe that Uras shows the exaggerated ambition of Fromm’s “Freedom to
      - The Dispossessed