Wednesday 11 April 2018

54. Freedom is more collective than individual

Freedom is not exactly what we were told.
It has something of freedom of choice, but freedom is not just freedom of choice. Freedom is about self ownership, but then we ended up discussing why we are falling to self-exploitation. Freedom has more to do with the power to execute this freedom of choice and take it to fruition. This freedom needs others. In this sense, freedom is a system of permissions, enablers and tools that are at our disposal or are within our reach to make things happen, to make our living, to create, to affect the world, etc.

A simple example would be to compare two teenagers that decided they want to study palaeontology and find two different responses from their family. The first one is congratulated, receives full financial support to conduct the studies, receives books that might be interesting, is introduced to family connections that work in this field and received emotional support in periods of frustration. The second one is critised for the poor decision, is cut off from financial support and ignored or even manipulated to redirect this wish and punished severely if unsuccessful.

Current narrative about freedom would portray the second one "you against the world" as the test for the free man, the self-made man, the hero. It is certainly a test. A test of will, a test of individuation. But this individual has been born into an environment with low intensity freedom. In different levels, we all have to break some barriers of this kind and that's why we understand and even believe that this is freedom or that this is all there is to it.

However, if we accept that this first teenager was making a free decision, receiving full permission and full support of the environment makes this teenager infinitely freer. Affluent families send their children to private schools, in part seeking to build the sort of network of connections that would open doors, that would help these children overcome obstacles in the future, but tend to sustain political views and support political speeches that speak about individual, heroic freedom as the true freedom. In a sense, the slogan "check your privilege" is pointing out at this systemic configuration that makes you freer than others, and more likely than others to succeed.



Freedom as a collective phenomenon

When we think about freedom as a collective phenomenon we understand that the exercise of freedom is not only to develop some sort of self-awareness to make free choices, but also to free others from their limitations and build a network of reciprocal relationships. Freedom is a social enterprise that requires empathy and generosity.  If this side of the equation of freedom is neglected, freedom within a society collapses.

An example that comes to mind is that of a poor woman that followed a government program to finish her school education. In her speech, she described how she had to organise her life differently, how she had to build a network of support (to care for her children while she was away, for example) to succeed. She had the feeling that the diploma itself was not as valuable as what she had to do to achieve it and that the true learning was to organise her life in a way that enabled her to achieve what she wanted. In other words to build an environment that supported her freedom.

The much-discussed freedom of speech needs at least a second person willing to hear. In a recent Whatsapp group discussion about a hot political issue, the first response of the group was censure. The group tried to "legislate" that some ideas could not be said in that group. In front of resistance and discussion about freedom of speech a member said "I'm sure you belong to other groups where you are free to discuss this", which in other words meant "in this group you are not free". It was a chilling alarm that made everyone realise that freedom requires much more work than we are told it needs. It certainly requires tolerance, but also a certain quality of relationships, a certain quality of speech to make any discussion possible.

When we look at freedom from this social perspective, we can understand how a political speech can be understood as a permission to commit hate crimes while at the same time we could discuss more deeply why political correctness is losing so many battles lately.

Investing in freedom

Freedom understood in social terms, means that we have to actively invest in the freedom of others first and demand reciprocity in return, which means that trust is a fundamental piece of the puzzle. We cannot build a free society or freedom in a general sense if we are not actively investing in the freedom of others. This investment might be time, physical work -commitment-, attention or money (mostly through taxes). In this sense, freedom is not only about our own liberation, it comes with the demand of our involvement and commitment to sustain freedom itself.  

It means that we can't be truly free if we are not working first so that we are all free. If I want freedom of speech, I have to invest time in listening to others, if I want access to education, I have to see that there is a system where anyone can access education.

It means that freedom requires relationships of trust. Trust that the others will reciprocate. And reciprocity does not follow a hard mathematical function or interest equation. We don't pay back a favour with interest. We don't pay back with the same "currency" and even we might not match exactly the favour received. However, there is a lot of wisdom in the fluid economics of reciprocity, with a very sophisticated sense of justice measuring intention, means, effort with no maths involved. 

It means that freedom is what we build when we build a system of social justice. 

Love and freedom

When we think deeply about freedom in this way, the issue of love and freedom starts to come closer together. Love, not as a romantic love, but rather as a generic way to refer to a relationship that would not be broken when we or the other are expressing individuality, a relationship that we are willing to invest in, to work out, etc. The highest form of freedom is experienced within bonds while being able to break up bonds is both the minimal and the ultimate expression of freedom.

Of course, when speaking about love, hate comes to the picture too. In this video, a former leader of a neo-nazi skinhead movement, speaks about his journey in and out of the group. He describes how this group gave him a sense of power and acceptance in a negative way when he could not find it in a positive one. And how much his rejection and hate could not be reconciled with the reality of what he found when he experienced meaningful interactions with people he thought he hated. He goes further and around min 12 he says that one of the biggest problems facing America is white domestic terrorism.
But the most interesting part of this video comes just after, when the case of a father "disowning" his white-supremacist son is discussed and how his cousin wanted the family to not welcome him anymore. This is a very good case where permissions, love, the limits of the relationships are discussed in a meaningful and real way (from min 15).



And finally, a video that I posted before, Zizek discusses freedom and false freedom in this video, in which he concludes inviting the viewer to question the notion of freedom itself. Something we all have to do, quickly, before we lose it.





Love as unpaid work

In feminist economical theory, many experts speak about "love is actually unpaid work" pointing out that women are constantly investing in others (through their care work), including investing in the freedom of others without collecting much. This lack of acknowledgement of the care work that women do, implies the feminisation of poverty: women have less access to jobs, jobs generally lack the flexibility motherhood requires, non working mothers become economically dependant and normally have no access to pensions (or living pensions) in old age. 
There is a pending chapter of the french revolution, where Liberté, egalité, fraternité explicitly excluded  women (fraternity=brotherhood). There is a pending chapter in economics, which are based in Adam Smith's ideas, including that no one does anything that is out of benevolence but rather out of self-interest.  Katrin Marcal points out in her book "Who cooked Adam Smith's dinner" that Adam Smith was living with his mum at the time he was writing the Wealth of the Nations, and even though there might be a degree self-interest in cooking his son's dinner, maternal love and maternal sense of duty cannot be reduced to self-interest.




The easy answer to the question of unpaid work tends to be universal income. But we all know that the year after universal income comes into place, national systems of education or health will become monetised too, because someone will rationally argue that there is no enough money and that now everyone has money and now everyone can pay exactly what they use blah, blah, blah. It will all be perfectly rational, but we will lose the wisdom of the other side of economics, the one that does not measure transactions with maths and interest and achieves a sense of justice regardless. In doing so, we might also be eroding this fabric of trust and social cohesion.

Love, equality, justice, freedom and economics are much more linked together than we think.  

Andrea

Monday 19 March 2018

53. The collective consciousness, the male gaze and the shape of water

Design of images - The male gaze

One of the most important concepts to expand is the concept of male gaze. This idea, coined by Laula Mulvey comes from the cinema, and explains a basic design and architectural perspective: on the one hand who is framing the picture, who is holding the camera, who is "representing", and on the other hand who is being observed and what is this observation. The conclusion that Laura Mulvey arrived to is that in cinema there is a "male gaze" where men are the camera holders, the directors and women as the object being seen, and often eroticized. This is such a valuable insight, that we can reframe many things and discover that this is a gaze that is much older than cinema. The following video produced by Playground says "it is easier to enter a museum as a naked muse than as a artist with a female name. In 1985, only 5% of the artists in the Metropolitan museum of New York were women, while 85% of the nudes were female. Today, those numbers have not changed much."



Image reading illiteracy 

How images are designed is a key aspect of today's culture. We consume many more "designed images" than we did just a few years ago, and incredibly more than when most of the designed images were in temples. Only in terms of advertising experts quote that in the 70's the american public was exposed to 500 adverts per day, today that figure grew to 5000. If we add our daily quote of Netflix, YouTube or TV that figure is immense. We struggle already with dealing with speeches and complex messaging, but how much do we know about image design? Do we know how to read them in a critical way? Do we spend our time debating frames, positions, poses, lighting, who's in and who's out the picture? No, we generally don't. The awareness of this image reading illiteracy is crucial in today's culture for many reasons:
  • Images are processed much faster than words, 
  • images are designed and read by our subconscious and unconscious mind, they convey, produce and reproduce ideology,
  • we are consuming much more designed images than ever before,
  • ultimately the dominant gaze has a big influence in shaping our collective consciousness/unconsciousness, our idea of God, order, justice and humanity.
Why is this critical thinking important with regards with images. Because they serve as templates to see and interpret reality. 


Women and minorities are the observed objects

One of the most poignant cases of how we are influenced by the male gaze outside the world of pictures is when we encounter a story about sexual abuse or even rape. Imagining a situation forces us to "see a picture" of what happened and probably feel something about it. We imagine the situation without thinking much and... what do we see? The default setting will probably be, seeing woman and her behaviour. We see what she is wearing, what she did or did not do, the "signs" she gave, and start to feel some criticism, disapproval of her behaviour. Basically, we automatically put ourselves in the heads of the male character, ie in the heads of rapists and predators and what they saw and what they felt. "Rapist are more often than not, moralists", says Rita Segato. But if we go back to ourselves, why do we adopt this perspective? Does it mean that we identify with rapists and predators? Yes and no. It mainly reveals that our collective consciousness has been shaped by a male gaze and therefore we imagine this scene through the eyes of the male figure of the scene, through this lens, unconsciously. In this example, the woman is "in frame" and therefore subject to our judgement. We find it easier to see, criticise and regulate behaviour of whomever is on frame. Subsequently, the narrative that follows this frame may tend to describe things in passive voice: "women are raped" (the perpetrator is absent/not named in the sentence, he is "behind the camera" figuratively speaking). But what happens if we put ourselves inside of the head of the woman? What does she see?

The asymmetry of a binary system

This asymmetry makes the issue of gender (and race and minorities) not a matter of a polarised system (of two polar equal opposites) but a binary one.

These labels also create a a system of two laws: 
  • The object observed (The Other) is under strict scrutiny: they have to control every aspect of their behaviour, every gesture, every piece of clothing, failures are considered deep flaws in character, proof of why they should be kept under ever stricter surveillance and control or even deserving of whatever bad happened to them, even if it means death. Under this logic, from a mini skirt to a petty crime can somehow justify capital punishment while any male observer of this behaviour can become instantly the judge and executioner, like the agents in the Matrix. "These executions" are outside the law we all know and discuss in congresses and parliaments, but in line with "the other law". 
  • The observer is somehow innocent, infantilized who do not bear the full weight of accountability and responsibility whose crimes can be either somehow justified, understood, be a matter of mental health (including addictions) or judged as mistakes, temporal losses of judgement or simply be fully justified. In this sense the position of the observer is a position of privilege. When we speak about white privilege, male privilege one of the aspects to understand is how they are observed v the rest. In his latest article for The Guardian, Gary Younge, proposes to analyse Boris Johnson's career from this perspective and points out at how his gaffes are routinely forgiven and overlooked.
Monsters: the fantastical is political

The Oscar winner director Guillermo del Toro has expressed in many occasions something that could be summarised as "the fantastical is political". He explained that zombie movies in the past were critical of consumerism and nowadays are some sort of "otherness hunting", where the other is completely stripped of their humanity and therefore is acceptable to hunt and kill them.

Because the two main character in The Shape of Water don't speak, it forces the viewer to see. In this way it shortens a distance between an animal world and the human world, between body and emotion. The silence offers a detachment from the detachment of language.

In this film, he tells a story with a different gaze but not quite. "I'm Mexican, I've been the otherness my whole life". It holds a different gaze regarding this otherness, because the film shows us a monster as a beautiful being, but the other is still something that is not human. It shows all the relationships and agency a poor mute woman has (she is friends with an Afro-american cleaner, a gay artist and supported by a Russian scientist), but she is a woman with no voice. It plays in this line between obedience in presentation (shape and form), and full disobedience in narrative and action. Not only because this "poor woman" is deeply disobedient, or because it is about a love story of a cleaner lady and a river monster but also because it shows the "bad guy" as part of a complex system of power relations where even the cold war is portrayed as some sort of organised improvisation of a power struggle: Russians and Americans fighting for a Latin-american river god; it shows Americans torturing it, guessing that there must be something useful there but not figuring out exactly what it is or how to find it out and Russians shown as more interested in spoiling it so the Americans do not use it against them.

"There are xenophobic films, that fear the foreigners and integrative films, where the monster is the most human character. No one cheers for the planes attacking King Kong, everyone is on the gorilla's side. I suppose this second option fits better with the way I understand the world".

The Shape of Water is a contradiction, water has no shape as love has no shape, "it can happen with someone very different to you, or have the same sex, and despite of that you recognise it".

In all the explanations that Guillermo del Toro gave about his Oscar winning film, he keeps explaining that films have a gaze, that films are political.

The male collective gaze and our cultural god

Through the default setting of the male gaze that structures our thoughts, our values and our common sense, we see and judge life. This gaze is very close to what we think God thinks and sees. "God does not love you" might be one of the messages routinely thrown out in twitter to any outsider by anyone. If we consider god as this collective gaze, the collective consciousness, even if it is as an exercise, then we can conclude that it is the community itself and no external entity who is rejecting this person, that it is up to us to love each other. In this sense, we can change this cultural god.

Thinking about god as a collective consciousness gives us a perspective of why god is seen as evolving, it gives us the sense that we can change what we judge and how, and we can reflect on how the collective consciousness is shaped. This is important, particularly in times when media is very concentrated and we are being profiled in social media and targeted with customised messages by the likes of Cambridge Analytical and its anti-marketing and anti-politics, where the product does not seek to attract and convince but it is rather a shapeshifter seeking to manipulate and seduce. These images and messages designed by no public figure are shaping, magnifying and deforming the values that decide who's accepted and who's rejected, who has a voice and who doesn't, whose life is worth protection and whose doesn't. Ultimately who lives and who dies.



Andrea