In 2014, when the geek internet was blowing up with the
controversy Gamergate, the forums at SomethingAwful.com were no exception. It
was such a toxic subject that it was confined to one thread. SA’s resident
communist movie critic, SuperMechaGodzilla, entered the fray – condescendingly lecturing everyone on
capitalism, the fun of videogames, Christianity, anti-semitism, and media
studies.
It was fantastic, and extremely educational. A point of view on GamerGate that was neither social justice totality, nor liberal/libertarian defensiveness.
Seinfeld was the most successful sitcom of the 90's, and has since been denounced as one of the most morally bankrupt pieces of art of the generation. The "show about nothing" to many critics became "nothing matters." This is completely wrong, and instead Seinfeld provided a valuable contrast between morality and ethics, two words often used interchangeably but importantly different.
Seinfeld was never a show about nothing, even when nothing happened. Seinfeld simply argued that nothing is all that any rational person can expect out of life. It was hilarious, but profoundly bleak. By consciously stating it had no higher message—the creators referred to this as the “no hugging, no learning” rule—it was able to goof around with concepts that battered the deepest tenets of institutionalized society. It was satire so severe that we pretend it wasn’t satire at all.Most episodes of Seinfeld circuitously forward two worldviews: The first is that most people are bad (and not very smart). The second is that caring about other people is absurd (and not very practical).
This all sounds very convincing, but also feels completely wrong when watching the show. It's easy to say "there was no moral in that episode" or whatever, but that fails to investigate what is actually going on, scene to scene. In what way were these people being bad, what were specific examples, how did the scene make us feel? Give me an example where Jerry was just greedy and caring about someone was just absurd, and is that all that was going on in that scene? (The entire point of this blog is to subject media to "atomic analysis" - instead of saying something like "Star Wars means classism", it's to zoom in on an individual scene, character, or shot and say "What is going on in this image? Oh, classism.") And watching Seinfeld, this definitely isn't a universe without rules. Every goddamn episode has several rules of society the cast obsessed over. The third episode contained an extended scene about the rules of rock paper scissors and how you claim dibs on a New York apartment. Perhaps an episode will find Jerry falsely accused of picking his nose. Or Elaine considering rules of contraception. Or George will be trying to gift a damaged sweater. Or Kramer will more often break a rule, and the others will have to explain to him why it was bad of him. And this, more than the "nastiness" of the characters seemed the eternal appeal of the show. We all live in a society with countless unwritten rules that define whether you are a good person, or a bad person. And Seinfeld was a show where these rules were dissected, and played with, and discussed openly. That is about as fun and addictive as TVtropes to many people. These "rules" were the heart of the show. And the cast did not take these rules lightly. Quite the opposite, they lived in constant fear of being caught breaking a societal rule. Sure, they knew they were good, reasonable people who should be considered polite members of society, but they were worried that at any moment someone else would think they were rule-breakers, the worst of the worst. Like Jerry just scratching is nose, but it looked like it was nose-picking from the side, and so someone might think of him as a nose-picker, and this would cost him a relationship with a hot model. ***
The wikipedia definition of morality is "the differentiation of intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are distinguished as proper and those that are improper"
Morals are the set of rules you follow to be a good person. Seinfeld talked more about "morals" more than any other television show in its decade. Despite taking them very seriously, the characters would frequently be talking about how to find loopholes in the rules, or why their motives to evade the rules were pure and acceptable, or how unjust it was to be treated like a rulebreaker by the good members of society. They were like tax lawyers, who took it very seriously never to violate the letter of the law, but had zero investment in the spirit of the law. This sort of perspective was helped by all the times they were falsely accused of rule-breaking, or when an episode would start with one of them making a faux paus that broke some rule they didn't know about, but the other cast would condescendingly inform them of. What was the source behind these rules? It was never religion, or a reasoned philosophical system, or what their heart told them - all rules were just social constructs, supported by the entirety of Society, in all of its terrifying ubiquity. When a rule was broken, every person the cast member encountered would begin treating them harshly, like some sort of unconscious outcast. The characters were entirely motivated by some Big Other who was judging them - and often judging them incorrectly ("I was only scratching my nose!") Of course, never breaking a rule was impossible. Either you might not know it (there were hundreds, enough to feed eight seasons of episodes, after all), or you might be misperceived as having broken a rule, or you might have thought you could get away with it but you embarrassingly got caught. This just led to a constant anxiety, which fed the spirit of the whole cast. The show wasn't just amoral, it was outright anti-moral. Why would it be okay, or at least sympathetic, to treat morals like this? ***
The wikipedia definition of ethics is "the branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct."
Ethics are the why behind any rule. And in the Seinfeld universe, the answer to every why is "because God says so". Not literally, these were all Jewish atheists, but they were appealing to a source of authority that was as vague and inscrutable as God: "other people," with no specificity or limit. Sometimes they would throw in "without rules everything would be chaos!" type justifications, but that's no explanation for why this specific rule. In fact, Seinfeld gave us the fantastic Moops rule of legal interpretation:
The plaintiffs’ argument is that the direct language in that single line is all that counts, and the language in the rest of the law does not. This is a legal argument that has no chance to win over judges who aren’t desperate to latch on to any rationale to gut Obamacare, and only a tenuous chance to win over even judges who are. The argument is, Democrats in Congress made a typo when you wrote Obamacare, so ha-ha, you lose. The card says“Moops.”
Lesson: rules of morality without deeper justification are just fucking terrible. But this does not mean there is no right or wrong in the Seinfeld universe. The scene above clearly indicates George is behaving wrongly: he is ignoring truth, and he is being a jerk to a medically disabled kid. But neither of those things are written in the rules of the game, so they are not the focus of his morals. But the moral rules in Seinfeld are worse than arbitrary, they are enforced by the social order. They are a source of fear and anxiety for the cast, and actively push them to adhere to letter-following instead of spirit-following. There is no room for compassion, or truth-seeking, or whatever fundamental ethical drive should motivate human behavior, when they already have a labyrinth of strictures to keep track of. And this is the existentialist problem with God. It's not that God couldn't exist. It's not that God couldn't even provide rules for human behavior. But what if He did? Humans would just be obsessed with trying to follow these rules, in fear of when they'll be caught or misperceived (by God!) for breaking a rule when they really didn't mean to. Humans would quickly go from Jesus' message of universal compassion to, well,the last 1500 years of the Catholic Church. This is not a post to laugh at silly Christians worshiping a false idol. For almost every culture, something as big and vague as God comes to stand in for that judging force, the one who gives us these arbitrary rules and is waiting for us to slip up. In communist Eastern Europe it was the State, in 1990's New York it's the Other of society, when we are children it is our parents.
Okay this one is pretty long. But also really important.
J:
This is the one I find most confusing, I think. But also most concerning.
A lot of people seem to write about the experience of being trapped in a system that obligates them to follow certain social norms that make them miserable. And my instinctive answer is always “then don’t do that? What do you care what other people think?”
Now sometimes that runs up against a certain sort of hard power; clearly you will care what other people think if they are credibly threatening violence against you. (Although I am sufficiently sheltered/privileged/oblivious to never have actually witnessed an act of violence, and thus to not alieve that violence actually happens, intellectually I’m aware that this is nonsense).
But most people seem to worry about being judged “by people”, as you wrote about eloquently a month ago. And this is a worry that I just don’t understand.
(My favorite story comes from a friend of mine, who was sitting in her cubicle one day drinking orange juice. And someone whom she had never seen before was walking by, and said “You shouldn’t drink orange juice. It will start your middle-aged spread.”
And I’d have a lot of issues with that interaction–starting from the fact that someone started a conversation with me when I was sitting alone minding my own business, moving through the unnecessary judginess, and possibly winding up at the fact that the criticism doesn’t even make that much sense. But my friend was really upset, and when I asked why, she said “I don’t want to stop drinking orange juice!”
I normally tell that story as a joke, with that last bit as the punchline. Becasue the link from “someone criticized me” to “I should change my behavior” just isn’t there in my head).
I think I tend to assume that if people think ill of me, that reflects badly on their judgment, and thus I don’t need to care what they think of me. It’s nice when a catch-22 works in my favor.
It also probably helps that I simultaneously am an introvert with low emotional bandwidth, and find it very easy to make friends. Not having enough close friends to spend time with isn’t a very real-feeling possibility to me, since at any given time I have more close friends than I can actually make time for.
Heh. I like your idea of a joke. It reminds me of one of Zizek’s favorite jokes:
A man who believes himself to be a kernel of grain is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to convince him that he is not a kernel of grain but a man; however, when he is cured (convinced that he is not a kernel of grain but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back, trembling and very scared—there is a chicken outside the door, and he is afraid it will eat him. “My dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a kernel of grain but a man.” “Of course I know,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken?”
So I really respect that you only see “hard limits” as going so far in controlling our social interactions. It’s easy to tell a story where your boss cares about every social signal you show, or your parents have a lot of sway over your life so their opinion of you is one of material force. This is true for some people, but it’s very easy to exaggerate. So I’m glad when people can see how much freedom they really have.
But, as you note, people still feel very socially limited. Why is that?
Whenever we are worried when some vague, undifferentiated group of people may socially judge us, in psychoanalytic terms that is fear of the Big Other. The theory here is that early on we imprint “there is a social other out there, and our subsistence relies on it, so we must stay in its good graces” and our brains never really stop thinking that way, even as we consciously become aware of specific people and their specific power (and lack of power) over us.
So what are all the vague forces that judge us for how we perform either our morality or social conformity? God. The Discourse. Those gossiping girls from high school. What would our parents think. What would the children think. The people in the grocery store watching us as our kid cries. Journalists who judge our subgroup. Corporations who sponsor them. The high school reunion.
These forces are all just very vague - it’s hard to prove how our actions lead to their judgment in a way that directly affects us, but it’s also hard to prove it never will. Most people choose some particular force, and obsess over whether it approves of them constantly. At the heart of it, we know we are a good person, but we worry this all powerful force might catch us at the wrong moment out of context and conclude we are a bad person, and then cast us into social abjection. See my Seinfeld review. But does the chicken know?
Now, the Big Other is nothing new. In fact you’d think modernity and the decline of tribes would if anything make it a weaker influence in our life. But the internet may put this into overdrive - we now have exact numbers knowing how many people like us, what activities of ours they like, and what number of people are downvoting us. What influence do any of these numbers have over our life? Unless you’re selling your brand, almost none, but LOOK LOOK THE NUMBER JUST WENT UP has combined our little Pavlovian hindbrain with our Lacanian fear of vague social judgment and it’s just an incredible social addiction most of us can’t escape. Hence my concerns about Twitter Hell.
Which brings us to the twofold answer of “Should we worry about other people?” I think we should care a great deal about what specific people think about us, and whether we have harmed them, and how to avoid harming them. But everyone could do with less worrying about what some vague, undefined group of people think about us, when there is no specific person who is going to affect us directly. (In fact, the worst case is when we care so much what the Big Other thinks of us, that we let that fear cause us to bring harm to a specific person. And that’s when we become the oppressor.)
The difference here can be roughly akin to alienation. Focus on the relationships that are real, and you have real control over. Get yourself out from the judgments of vague groups that may not even exist and how Tumblr followers and Facebook likes will respond to your actions.
One of the most potent forms of the Big Other is “the opinion of future generations.” I was reminded of this by @ilzolende ‘s discussions.
The “future” is an understandable God to worry about for a number of reasons:
It’s objective. We’re so caught up in a current struggles, we like to think about someone who isn’t self interested in any of our fights, judging from the Veil of Ignorance, who’s gotten information about how it all works out.
We judge the heck out of the past. We worry about people thinking the same thing about us we think about the Confederacy.
Whig history, and general idealization of the future as better and a source of progress.
We all are searching for a Big Other to comfort us that our decisions were moral and just, and posterity sounds a lot less bankrupt at this point than God or those high school cliques.
We’re afraid that if the future thinks badly of us, we won’t be around to defend ourselves.
I certainly grew up as a good liberal believing the future would judge me well for fighting for gay rights, just like I judged the civil rights activists of the sixties as the good guys. (In fact I was amazed anyone could not be on the obvious winning side.)
And yet… there is no God to guarantee meaning, not even the future. They are not actually a morally superior arbiter of our present day actions, because they are just a bunch of normal humans.
Maybe white nationalists will win and the future will be racist and fascist.
Maybe no records of you will really stand out and while the future may have broad opinions about goods guys and bad guys in the twenty-teens, they won’t know anything about you specifically (and your special snowflake philosophy that didn’t fit neatly into the black and white ideologies isn’t remembered at all.)
Maybe the future will be wholly caught up in completely different moral divides, and our big arguments will look as senseless to them as the Dreyfus affair or the Butter Battles.
Maybe history is written by the victors and you might lose a war, the wrong guys might win, and they make up a bunch of shit about you.
Maybe people in the future will be as divided as we are now, and by and large too busy to think about us.
Maybe a big rock will destroy the world and no one will exist to judge us.
They’re just… more humans, with no guarantee of moral accuracy that we don’t have.
Which means you have to decide your ethical bedrock now, and stick to it no matter what some other people think of you. Even your descendants. If you believe that all races are equal, you’d fight for it even if your brother disagreed. Well, same for your great granddaughter.
What’s right just has to be right. No one can vouchsafe it for you.
We’re going to discuss some terminology, in order to answer an ask today.
We’ve already mentioned the “Other,” as that social force we worry about judging us. It’s not a specific person who has a legitimate way of measuring us (like our boss at a performance review) but rather it’s vague, dispersed forces who we want to think of us as a good, normal, generically acceptable person.
This should more properly be called “the Big Other”, to differentiate it from the way we just refer to “the Other” as someone who is different or separate from us (I prefer calling that the Neighbor.)
But let us be more specific. In fact, we’re going to define no less than three French critical theory terms. In addition to the Other or Big Other, there is also the Dark Other, also known as the Other of the Other. And lastly there is jouissance. These (psychological fantasies) all work in tandem.
The Big Other is more a controlling authority. It is the entity we worry about having ultimate authority over judging our value. The best symbol of this is “St Peter at the Pearly Gates”, which many political cartoons have used as a way of saying “our society condemns this person.” There’s not justification for where his authority comes from, it is just unquestionable and all encompassing. We want him to think well of us. We know we are good (or at least “acceptable”) but his judgment is actually imperfect and we worry he will misperceive us and think that we are bad.
The Dark Other is the evil conspiracy that is responsible for this mistake. It is also all powerful, and it wants to trick the Big Other into thinking we are actually bad. It’s willing to use all sorts of dark arts and tricks to subvert the natural ordering of things, and interfere with what should be the good judgment the Big Other has of you. Think of Satan as the Serpent tricking us into disobeying God, or that gossip at work who is spreading rumors about you in order to deny you that promotion.
The Dark Other is why so many ideological enemies are depicted as both all powerful, and pathetically impotent. They can get away with anything in our fantasies and no one is stopping them, but also if their deception of the Big Other fails, they are completely powerless due to their excremental nature. They have no virtues of their own to work with, only that what they steal. Why do they do this? To take our…
Jouissance is a term for our ultimate enjoyment. It’s a thing we want very, very much but do not have a concrete image for. Our freedom. Our harmony. Our happiness. Our prosperity. We only want a “normal” or balanced amount of it, for fear that too much of us would drown us in a nightmarish fantasy a la the Sorceror’s Apprentice. That is a healthy appetite (we believe.) Why don’t we have enough though, why aren’t we happy?
Because, the Dark Other wants too much jouissance. They have excessive greed - so they aren’t weird for what they want, but just wanting too much of it (note American fantasies about how Islamic extremists all have a dozen wives and want a paradise with 77 virgins. We can’t say wanting sex is wrong, but they want too much of it. That makes them freaks.)
The [Dark Other] deceives the [Big Other], who should love us, in order to steal our [jouissance].
Now that all sounds very academic and made up… but take almost any ideology and play Mad Libs with it, as their explanation for what’s wrong with the world.
Here’s SMG using Winnie the Pooh to talk about the absurd Matrix backstory where machines are keeping humans as batteries.
It actually is important that they are not taking a physical thing. Heat can be generated and power can be restored, but Morpheus chases a fantasy of perfect fulfillment that cannot ever be achieved.
In Winnie The Pooh (2011), Pooh fantasizes about gliding effortlessly through a literal ocean of hunny (his favorite food), consuming it endlessly without becoming full or sick. At one point in the narrative, Pooh and the other animals are led to believe - through a series of misunderstandings - that the hunny was taken from them by an insidious figure called The Backson.
The Backson, though completely fictional, is described in vivid detail as causing everything from socks getting lost in the dryer to mortality itself.
Morpheus’ belief that destroying the ‘Big Other’ (aka the matrix, aka God) will 'free people’s minds’ and fix everything actually just engenders conspiracy theories about an 'Other of the Other’ who controls everything:
“When the "pacifying” symbolic authority is suspended, the only way to avoid the debilitating deadlock of desire, its inherent impossibility, is to locate the cause of its inaccessibility into a despotic figure which stands for the primordial jouisseur: we cannot enjoy because HE amasses all enjoyment…“
In other words, Morpheus believes the Backson has stolen his hunny. And, to paraphrase The Wicker Man, killing it won’t bring back his god-damned hunny.
To take @ozymandias271 ITT question, “What was Gamergate?” Well it was an ideology with the Dark Other being social justice activists, and the Big Other being corporations and journalists and Stephen Colbert, and the jouissance was video games. Or from the other side, it was a Dark Other of fratboys and incels on reddit, with the same Big Other and jouissance they are trying to win over.
When in truth there were near infinite videogames for everyone, and the Big Other in this case was just corporations who do not care about anyone, and just want their money and to turn you into a soulless consumer/producer automaton.
In our “War on Terror,” conservatives worry that Muslims want to “steal our freedom” but are deploying race-baiters to trick the American public into thinking that conservatives are bad people (who are racist, or want to kill all Muslims, etc etc.)
You can see this triptych over and over in very different ideological groups. Nazis, Stalinists, a neighborhood housing association, your favorite fantasy novel. Even the way fans talk about the Prequels is put in the form of a complaint where George Lucas is the Dark Other keeping them from their dream of infinite immersive Star Wars. And once you have an understanding of the terminology, you can defang the arguments that you know feel wrong but were not able to explain how before.
