sadism at work
I watched Severence months ago and I'm still obsessed.
The show revolves around the idea of, what if it were possible to sever the connection between your work self and who you are in your personal life?
It’s one of those accidental dissociation representation shows, because the premise isn't all that far-fetched, it’s a reality the human mind to split, create barriers, "forget," when circumstances of survival call for it. The differences in Severence is, it's a procedure consciously chosen and mediated by outside technology.
But the everyday, non-scifi reality is that we don't really get to decide what our brain allows us to remember. Relationships, emotions, experiences are either permitted to permeate your working memory of the world or they are filtered selectively, perhaps even blocked out completely. It just happens. A switch is thrown and the brain curls around itself protectively, a kink in the flow of identity and reality.
Bessel van der Kolk says dissociation is the essence of trauma, and its easy to hear the word trauma as this big dramatic event. The truth is, we are all affected by the trauma of separation, of abandonment from meaningful connections and social care. We are conditioned to accept circumstances we know we have no desire or interest in, all in the name of survival. When deep down, some part of us knows we need and deserve better.
I found these images from the show paired with excerpts from David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (h/t citizenabovesuspicion) and the juxtaposition makes the kinky element to capitalism unnervingly clear.
Work is a "scene" we consent to– a cauldron of opportunities for humiliation, suffering, and degradation– yet how meaningful is our consent really, when the exchange is our dignity and energy for a paycheck, for survival?
BDSM is just the reality of dominator culture painted fantasy (I agree to this for pleasure)
Hierarchical control, subordination, humiliation, and the sadism of forced and coerced labor, unnatural environments and conditions for the human spirit...
Work is also the reality of dominator culture painted fantasy (I agree to this out of duty)
I often struggle with how to show up in writing about these connections because it often either feels too raw and inescapable a wound or conversely, impossible to access. The dissociation goes deep. The part of me that knows and the part that doesn't warring over "does this even matter?" Who am I to know about this?
It flies in the face of all accepted reality to question capitalism while being immersed in it, in ways similar to questioning BDSM when you're still in it. The system has you, and everyone around you, so it feels crazy-making to protest at all.
Suspended by hooks from the ceiling, beat to a pulp. Surely, it can’t be that bad. Oh, god, we think. Surely, it can’t be that bad. As the forests burns and the rivers ooze pollution, the schools bleed and the soul stagnates…surely, we think. Safe sane and consensual. Risk-aware. Men only take out their misogyny to play, right? That Nazi uniform is just a fetish, they say. And the cops are always wearing leather boots. We can opt out any time, can’t we? Can’t we?
I can’t remember, did I choose this? Or was that just what I was told to believe?
I like to think my time in kink spaces wasn’t so bad. There were fun parts, weren’t there? Good people, good times. It’s only now, on the outside, I taste the metallic tang. Run fingers over the ripples of guilt at leisure and pleasure, the way the culture slave-trains us to eroticize self-harm. How dare I be free?
Surely, it can’t be that bad. We go down into the dungeon and forget the earth’s degradation and the weeping heart. We come back up and say, I’m doing good work down there. It’s ok that I don’t remember. It’s better that I forget. The very system killing us is the one that cuts me away from feeling the pain of it all. So surely. It can’t be that bad. It’s just a kink.
