12 Years a Slave and the Authority of the BIG Other

by Christopher Barr

“When we speak (or listen, for that matter), we never merely interact with others; our speech activity is grounded on our accepting and relying on a complex network of rules and other kinds of presuppositions. That is to say, our communication with others (and with our self, perhaps) is grounded in and acted out through ‘the big Other.’ The big Other comes through us in how we speak and in how we comprehend the other.”  -  Slavoj Zizek

12 Years A Slave was a brilliant film depicting a point in early American history that most people would wish to forget, but should never want to.  It’s based on the autobiography of Solomon Northrup, a black man that lived in New York State with his family as a free people.  He dined and wined and played violin while living a life of a cultured man in an intellectually growing society.  He was then sold into slavery and lived 12 years as a beaten man that was the property of his white masters.

Solomon was a bit unique in the traditional telling of this story, the story of black people during slavery.  Unique because unlike the stolen black people shipped to American from Sierra Leone, Africa, Solomon was already an American enjoying the wealthy fruits of the new world.  He was pulled from that life and transported to a life of living hell, a hell thanks to the white people that believed that these black people they had purchased were their property.

One thing I found most interesting about this film was the authority a human being held over another, simply as a point of rule.  There was no actual universal rule that justified why one race of people held dominion over another race of people.  There were a number of times throughout the film I was thinking, ‘storm the master, kill him or her and then be free.’  But the slaves didn’t, these plantations and cotton picking fields didn’t have barbwire fences like prisons do today.  There were no walls, no prison guards, just obedience, fear of the Big Other, fear of grand authority when none existed in the real world but only within the Symbolic Order, the rule was that those black slaves were property.  Not only did the masters know it but the slaves knew it all too well.

I’m reminded of a book I read when I was studying criminology about police detectives commenting on troubling cases they had.  One such case was of a man with a knife that broke into a house during thanksgiving and held a whole family at knife point.  There were five little kids, four women and five men, all varying in age.  This one man with a knife entered their house, overtook everyone, tied them all up and proceeded to murder them one by one.  He started with the youngest, two little girls, cutting and slicing them and then worked his way up to the oldest.  It took him all night but he slaughtered and tortured them all, then left, never to be caught.  The cops on the case were horrified, as anyone would, but they were perturbed about one thing, after realizing the perpetrator held only a knife, why didn’t they jump him?  There were five grown men and four grown women, why not jump him?  Surely one or two might’ve been killed but they would have eventually overpowered this man.  But they didn’t, their collective fear of the authority of the Big Other kept them, unfortunately in their place long enough for this crazed man to fulfill his sick fantasy.

What I find thought-provoking about the Big Other is it only exists within the Symbolic Order and outside that, it is meaningless.  It’s us who give it meaning as did the black people during the slave days.  Through our ignorance, either self-imposed or governmental, we simply comply because we don’t know better.  We do this with areas that don’t harm us directly like religion and government in most cases, but yet we comply because they seem to know better and we don’t question it.

No human being should have to be subject to slavery no matter what their race, but we live in a world of slavery.  We always have and always will.  The elite will continue to enslave its populace, but the difference from now and then, is we are unaware of that slavery.  Unlike inmates in prisons who are aware of their incarceration, we are unaware of our own slavery and servitude to the corporate and governmental system, which pays us enough to make us feel free but never enough to rise up above the system and revolt.    

The only point to tell a true story of slavery is to juxtapose it with the state of today.  People need to reflect on themselves and their station in modern society, where they work and who rules over them.  This film was about the death of cultivation, the death of learning so the so-called strong can hold supremacy over the so-called weak.  This is the story of today as it was the story then, not to take way from the atrocities of that time in American history, but it’s important we don’t think of the film as simply a period piece that society has grown and evolved out of.  I think we should see the film as something contemporary and present, we should see the film as a telling of how we are capable of treating each other, and how the aspiring man can become victim to those that have fallen, not religiously but intellectually and logically.

Religion in this film plays the part of mediator; it allows the white man power over their black slaves without dogmatic judgment.  As religion is not an actual real phenomena outside the imagination of men, the ruling class were able to make their laws on slavery divine, simply because they said so, before they wrote the book in the name of a divine creator they themselves created.  Black people followed this white man’s bible as scripture from the lord and savior without ever realizing that they as a race were scammed two fold, not only do they follow it but they followed it into their own servitude.  It can be said that it wasn’t up to them to understand that they were to become victims of property labor law in the early days of the United States.  Ideally the innocent should be free of such thoughts but in the time of slavery it simply wasn’t the case.

Why do we fear a man with a gun, because he may shoot us?  Why do we fear a man with a voice over a hundred people because he has the power to kill us all?  Or does he, I’m thinking there might be a bluff in there somewhere.  Maybe the point of the story is the person we fear the most when it comes to how we look at the world is ourselves.  The Big Other is how we look at the world and not how the world is.  Slavery exists today and is hidden from our first world purview, so we can all sit and lament about how bad they all had it, as we watch our 300 channels and wear designer clothing, manufactured by modern day slaves that live during our time but simply out of our view.

“My narrative is at an end.  I have no comments to make upon the subject of Slavery.  Those who read this book may form their own opinions on the ‘peculiar institution.’  What it may be in the other States, I do not profess to know; what it is in the region of Red River, is truly and faithfully delineated in these pages.  This is no fiction, no exaggeration.  If I have failed in anything, it has been in presenting to the reader too prominently the bright side of the picture.  I doubt not hundreds have been as unfortunate as myself; that hundreds of free citizens have been kidnapped and sold into slavery, and are at this moment wearing out their lives on plantations in Texas and Louisiana.  But I forbear.  Chastened and subdued in spirit by the sufferings I have borne, and thankful to that good Being through whose mercy I have been restored to happiness and liberty, I hope henceforward to lead an upright though lowly life, and rest at last in the church yard where my father sleeps.”     - Solomon Northrup  (Closing passage to his autobiography.  1853)