Divergent Review: Why Jeanine Is Correct In Trying To Destroy Abnegation

Abnegation, if left unchecked,will destroy the faction system.

Jeanine is absolutely correct. Any Divergent can choose Abnegation and hide safely there. Abnegation children raised in Selflessness may choose other factions to experience difference.

But why is she correct?

The Quaker Society of Friends is very close to Abnegation in clothes, demeanor, choice of food, and ideals in their way of life.

It is the Quakers who brought down slavery in the colonies and ultimately the states. They were the first Abolitionists. Beginning in Virginia in 1760. 100 years before the start of the Civil War the stones were laid as foundation to destroy slavery.

The Society of Friends have been active in every anti war movement since they arrived in North America. They were particularly influential during the Viet Nam War and the formal and informal Resistance to it.

Gandhi's non-violent resistance brought down the British Empire's control and occupation of India. His open attack on the caste system stuck a deep wedge in it. Castes were worse than factions as you were born into them and could never leave. Your caste determined your entire life, how much education you would receive, what kind of work you would be allowed to do.

Jeanine Matthews perceives all this as coming from the future and she attempts to forestall it. The divergent population, the transferring to other factions will result in the breaking down of the faction system little by little over time. It is inevitable and Jeanine sees this. She is taking what measures she thinks will avoid it however expertly she implements it, she cannot stop it.

DIVERGENT and Deconstructing Touching

Last Dinner at Abnegation

This dinner and its setting is very like a present day Amish meal in the home. People eat quietly, saying just what they must. It is stifling for anyone who starves for intelligent conversation while eating with family and/or friends. Tris's anxiety about choosing is controlled. Caleb's secret is contained. And nothing really much is said. Just the allusion to Marcus's beating his son to cause his defection. Not true of course.

This is reality that conceals the REAL. The false contentment that replaces joy and spontaneity. Beatrice thinks there is something missing in her because she can't be selfless enough. 

One can see how feelings fester in this environment.

Perhaps some Ritalin!

This is what peace looks like. And it is monotonous and boring eh.

This is also the Happy Ending readers and movie goers want for Tris and Four. The happy family. No faction problems. Just quiet contentment. Children, a dog perhaps, etc. 

The Happy Ending. And all this is conveyed in a short dinner scene. This is a director and a screen writer who are seriously intelligent.

Awkward Embraces

The Lack of touch is so acute in this scene. The awkward embracing of people who are not used to showing affection to each other. And certainly not passion or desire.

The movie moves on to focus on every time Four touches Tris. She feels each one intensely. He is touching indifferently. Factually you might say until this scene.

Four Advising Tris on Fighting Peter

This time he grabs her arm roughly to make sure she remembers what he told her about fighting. That she must attack first and not go on the defensive. Of course her short lived initial success with Peter surprises him and infuriates him so that he hurts her even more. And Eric signals for him to put her away with a  kick at the end of it.

Lamb to the Slaughter Compliments of Eric

They all know he has arranged for this match to eliminate Tris for talking back to him at the knife throwing. This is the way it goes for truth-tellers, for parrhesiastes. 

Desire/Lack in Touching

Step back: the pattern in the tapestry

won’t tell itself till more of it is made.

Although it’s eighty-seven in the shade,

we have to work this hard making the hist-

ory we need till, trusting it, we’re free

to kiss each other better than when we

imagined kissing when we hadn’t kissed.

Marilyn Hacker in Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons 

I would say the same is true on waiting to experience sex.

DIVERGENT: Reading Jeanine's Strategy and Tris's Radical Otherness Through Zizek

"Abnegation if left unchecked, will destroy the faction system"

Jeanine is absolutely correct in knowing that Abnegation will eventually ruin the peace based on the  faction system as it is, patterned closely on the Quakers and on Gandhi's method of Satyagraha that brought down the United Kingdom, and disrupted the Indian Caste system, where people were born into a caste (determining their entire lives) with never any chance of change. But what did the Quakers do? 

They began the resistance to slavery in 1760 in Virginia. They were active in the Resistance Movement against the Viet Nam War. Quakers believe in carrying their ideals and beliefs into action. They are not Sunday Christians. The Quakers initiated the abolition movement, destroyed slavery and the wealthy plantation system that depended on enslaved labor. It took about 100 years.The Quakers also fomented the resistance and end to the Viet Nam War. Does anyone think Abnegation cannot do this to the faction system?

Abnegation is obstructing Jeanine's plans to introduce materialism and prosperity, i.e. capitalism. They will not be complicit in fostering "capitalism" which will be less regulated, or unregulated by any moral codes of behavior.

The movie reveals many things to us without comment. We see some older people in Abnegation as the crowds move in the streets toward the Initiation Ceremony, but few if any in Dauntless. We also see older people in Amity. We slowly learn that the factionless mainly come from failed initiates, especially Dauntless. Dauntless is itself increasing the population of the factionless, increasing the problem of homeless hoards. Dauntless thus creates the factionless that they must protect the city against. Dauntless creates its own reason for being. This information comes to us in a purely visual form with the announcement of being chosen, some information that requires us to connect some dots. 

It is apparent that at one time Dauntless - and the other factions - were created by some spontaneous and authentic feelings. The factions as we see them 100 years after have become institutionalized. The factions have entered the Order of Production, ensuring irreversibility, metastasizing. What might have transpired is being changed into an Event by Jeanine.

This is what Edward Snowden warned about the NSA mass collection of information. He did not say that it was being misused BUT that at any time the administration of NSA changed, with those coming to leadership positions there, this could easily happen. That different people could decide to use the information in a different way that would compromise citizens and reveal their personal lives to their detriment.

Divergent gives us this moment in time where institutionalized factions - and we are most familiar with Dauntless - have metastasized into a totalitarian mini state and formed an alliance with Erudite.

As Baudrillard tells us through Nietzsche, when the Symbolic Order moves into the Order of Production it becomes IRREVERSIBLE. It metastasizes. This is what we see with Dauntless. New Rules. Roth's book makes this clear in Four's complaining to Tris, but if we can read through Baudrillard we need no explanation as to what's going on here. The Order has changed in Dauntless and in Erudite. Science and technology are on their way to endless complication. The Foucauldian Grid of power/knowledge is now visible.

Tris is a true revolutionary. Katniss is a figurehead and those using her are violently fighting the government. So why is Tris this radical figure? An imaginary figure Jeanine has had nightmares about is now present in her reality. 

Tris is exemplifying Zizek's prescription for breaking the system. One embraces the idealistic pronouncements and works to make them surface, to become reality, to truly be what they are. 

Dauntless Manifesto

• We believe in ordinary acts of bravery, 
• And in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.
• Dauntless never give up.

So here we have the ideology. You know like our own freedom, equality and justice for all.  Zizek will say to over-identify with the ideology to force it to be what it says it is or disintegrate. Tris has over-identified and continues to push it.

HOW?

First she believes it. (Roth's book pushes this point over and over. To make sure we get it.) The movie shows us Tris's face as Max gives the Manifesto in an address to the new initiates and they are lifted and carried in a ritual of solidarity. An act now empty of meaning but an act of propaganda for the initiates who are seduced. Then she begins to participate in the reality of the training which has little to do with the ideology and a lot to do with obedience and "never giving up."

Discipline and Punish - Michel Foucault

Clearly only an Abnegation born and transferring to Dauntless is innocent enough to take this to their hearts. This is why they are a danger to Erudite. Tris  believes in the ideology of Dauntless that does not exist in the example of the leaders. Is this familiar to the reader?

This is what forces Tris to expose herself by becoming a PARRHESIASTES. This is the kind of behavior to expect from Abnegation. It is the kind of behavior to expect from the Quaker community, the Society of Friends. It was the kind of behavior that Gandhi displayed to bring down the United Kingdom. "That little man in the loincloth," as Churchill called him. So Jeanine is correct to fear it. Abnegation will eventually ruin her plans, obstruct them for sure. 

Jeanine opts for our present government's preference: PRE-EMPTIVE THREAT. That is, like the movie Minority Report, stop the projected violence before it happens, while it is just a small weed to be rooted out, as Mao says of capitalism. This is what our police and law enforcement are doing today. We are under surveillance to make sure we do not plan to do anything in the future that the government might object to. 

Jeanine is very modern. She is taking precautions and she is correct in doing so from her perspective.

12 Years a Slave- Reading Through Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe

Solomon Northup Kidnapped and Held As a Slave 1841-1853

In the beginning of this film  when drugged and kidnapped, Northup protests that he is a free man. He is accused by the auctioneers of being a runaway. He is not but perhaps they do think he is. There is no reason for these sleazy businessmen to believe him, to check to see if he is in fact a free man. That would take time eh. And a lot of money is at stake. So why would they let him go even if they believed him.

My perception always has a Foucault default. I am reading Richard Cote The Life of Dolley Madison, a sort of very readable biography of Dolley with lots of pictures of her homes in Philadelphia just a few blocks from where I used to live so that's why I picked up the book. 

It begins with her ancestry which was Quaker. Her father was disturbed by the fact that he owned slaves to work his plantation in Virginia. About 50 of them. He had converted to the Society of Friends after he married Mary Coles who had been disowned by the Quakers for marrying him, an Anglican. He becomes more Quaker than a Quaker as converts often are wont to do. And his conscience is troubled by the fact that he owns slaves. 

In 1760 in Virginia the Law as passed by the Virginia House of Burgesses read "that it was illegal to emancipate a slave in Virginia except by Government act. Virginia Quakers and their meetings could oppose slaveholding and support emancipation, but they were prohibited by law from freeing their slaves. If a slave was freed, by a Quaker or anyone else, he or she could be captured and sold as a runaway."

A paragraph that a reader could read and continue on to the next page. But with Foucault on default it stops you in your tracks. Foucault spent his life in archives reading tattered papers, partly illegible to uncover statements like this. It is a colonial law of the colony of Virginia. There are certainly similar laws in Alabama,Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, etc. But this is Virginia, the place where Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe all have family plantations with enslaved workers. 

That's 4 out of 5 of our first presidents, all from Virginia, all with family plantations going back to the 17th century. Yes we know they are racists but that is the tip of the iceberg here.

The Law reads what you can't do. You can't free your slave. Assuming you are a decent person if you want to free your slave, what are the consequences if you do this. Capturing/kidnapping and being resold to the highest bidder, and very likely a far worse situation from which you are freed. 

This Law also has an emptiness. The only thing you are not allowed to do is FREE your slave. 

You can beat, maim, kill, rape, torture, breed, set dogs on, force fights to the death, well just about anything the perverse imagination can come up with, you can do. 

The only thing you can't do is FREE  this slave. And if you do this slave will never really be free. This slave will always be looking over her/his shoulder as there are stories of abductions and disappearances. 

Switching my reading to Zizek/Lacan, the Big Other owns the slave you think you own. If you can only free this slave by government approval, then you really don't own the slave, do you? The Big Other owns the slave you think you own. You can do all manner of evil to this slave, BUT YOU CANNOT FREE HER OR HIM! (p.64)

At the base of our legal system by 1760 is pure sophistry. A Law by Pharisees. It contains a poison pill. It puts the person of integrity in a CATCH-22 situation. Unable to keep a slave or free the slave. It forces hypocrisy. 

Now who is responsible for this law? Does anyone think that the largest plantation owners in Virginia, the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Madisons, and Monroes were innocent of this law? We know James Madison's grandfather served in the Virginia House of Burgesses from 1761-1769. He would have had to have known of this law. Who formulated it like this?

And why this law at this time? Foucault teaches to look at what else is going on. To look at the intersections of different "comings to be" and in this case it is the influx of Quakers from Pennsylvania to the Carolinas (liberal Constitution) and Virginia to farm large tracts of cheap land through the use of slave labor. Quaker meetings are not about listening to someone give a sermon. They involve silence and the necessity someone feels to speak to the group. So one can expect there were many raised discussions about slavery, and surely the well known founding fathers of the Anglican persuasion knew about these dissenting discussions.

Virginia was a bastion of slaveholding.  In 1765, the Quaker minister John Griffith wrote that "the life of religion is almost lost where slaves are numerous....the practice being as contrary to the spirit of Christianity as light is to darkness." (p. 64) By 1769 the Paynes had come to believe that slaveholding was morally indefensible.  Three months after the Declaration of Independence was signed, John Payne, Dolley's father freed one of his slaves in a formal declaration leaving no doubt as to his intent. Then he freed the rest of them. In defiance of Virginia Law. 

But the legal tide began to change. In  1782 manumission became legally permissible. In Virginia.  Notice the wording. You are now permitted to free your slaves, meaning that someone who really owns them gives you that permission, the Big Other. of Lacan. (Only in Virginia that I know of. A liberal state.A great genealogical research topic for someone.)

The Virginia Legislature passed a law that gave all slaveowners the power to emancipate their slaves by will after death, "or by acknowledging the will while still alive, in open court, provided they agreed to support all the aged, infirm, and young persons thus set at liberty.  (p.68) And here we have another poison pill, another Catch-22 eh. Legally they cannot be kidnapped, captured and resold but of course it went on up to 100 years later - Solomon Northup. And how could a farmer, no matter how wealthy, take on the feeding, sheltering and care of so many people having lost a free labor force. John Payne tried sharecropping with the ones that stayed with him but that was not profitable for either the freed slaves or the former owner.

The great wealth of plantations depended completely on slave labor. Without the slaves the wealth was gone. 

Is it not wickedly ironic that the two areas of Western Civilization that produced democracy - Athens and the North American colonies - also produced the intellectual leisure of enough men to imagine freedom, buying the time for this by slave labor.

At the structural base of our judicial Law lies a terrible contradiction embedded in it. The Sophistry of a Law contradicted by its inability to be enacted and enforced properly. This is the reality. The word racism only conceals this deeper dirty little secret. (p.68)

And beyond this lies the REAL - the invisible REAL - of Zizek thinking through Lacan. Invisible is the early capitalism that inspires this disastrous hypocrisy of subterfuge and deliberate lies. 

Who are the legislatures that couched these two laws in such duplicitous language? Did our "forefathers" aid them. Here's an example of Jefferson's thinking worthy of a subtle Jesuit or ancient Chinese wise man on where to have the capitol city. Philadelphia wanted it - but do not forget the Quakers were there (a danger) in great strength of wealth and numbers - New York also but it was a center of commerce. The Virginians wanted the new city on the Potomac and here's how Jefferson got a go on that:

In June 1790 Jefferson called a meeting with Madison and Hamilton in New York. They struck a deal. Hamilton had proposed that the federal government pay off the federal debt and assume the debts incurred by the separate states during the Revolution. Madison opposed this. Jefferson proposed that Hamilton get the Pennsylvanians to vote for a permanent capitol on the Potomac in exchange for locating it in Philadelphia for a decade. Madison should not object too strongly to the debt assumption bill. Jefferson got what he wanted. This is the same kind of thinking in the earlier slave laws eh. Give them something they want so you can get what you really want. (p.83)

Notice who was paying for this.

Is it any wonder that Cumberbatch's character did not free Northup but resold him. That Pitt's character was afraid to write the letter he promised he would.