Chez
Sade: what's cooking tonight? Soul Murder, replied the
Judge:
Some
draft notes about collaboration between consenting partners
John
Schostak, March 1996
Both in here and
out there is hell: the trick is not to see it and to call it
home, a place where the heart never is. Unapproachable, and
unreal - yet motivating all the greatest crimes. The ideal
is to be clean, tidy, fit to raise a family. This family is
but a political stratagem for the arrangement of the bodies
and the actions of those who live under its surveillance.
Becoming a subject of the home and its land is to be placed
under instruction, kept in the place of instruction, placed
under surveillance, recorded, filed. In the best homes this
is accomplished within the spirit of collaboration, you
might call it an upbringing through the pedagogy of voice
training. Its ideal might be thought of as the
ventriloquist's dialogue with the dummy at the
breast.
Sade was a teacher.
He taught the usual things, manners, mastery, knowledge of
virtues and vice and the ability to choose the ways for a
successful and satisfying life. Julliette realised early on
that life is not fair and the deceitful, the murderers, the
torturers, the exploiters by and large are the winners, the
successful, the rich, the happy, the inheritors of the
earth. Justine, by contrast, never learnt and fell for it
everytime. Let's call Sade's philosophy the way of the world
without the blinkers on. It is the direct opposite, or so it
seems to the educational philosophy of one Daniel Gottlieb
Moritz Schreber a 19th century German physician and
'educator' whose books were translated into many languages
and were very popular influencing the education system and
the views on child rearing of the time. Of his two sons one
committed suicide, the other went mad and wrote a book about
his mental illness that was subsequently analysed by Freud.
Of the three daughters little is known except that it
appears they were a bit strange (Schatzman 1971). The son
who went mad was a judge and so knew the letter of the law
and could pronounce it - it was he who wrote of soul murder
and heard the voices.
Voice is what seems
so valuable. To give a voice to someone is a great gift.
Judge Schreber had the gift of many - many thousands of -
voices in his head. They were put there by a pedagogy that
sought to instil rational mastery of body and mind and a
love of God. In contemporary times the methods would perhaps
be called behaviourism, management by objectives, and the
setting of performance criteria in conjunction with
systematic auditing. It is a system of total surveillance
and control. Schreber's day is not past. It is only just
arriving. And so we should think a little bit about its
methods and its practical results.
Sade's day,
perhaps, has always been here - always will be. Sade knows
about voice. Only the masters - that is, the libertines -
have a voice. They are the one's who are educated. The
others are simply animals to be butchered and used. To have
a voice, in effect, is to go through a process of education
- the rest is butchery. Airaksinen (1995:107) summarizes the
educational process of one of Sade's characters:
...
Eugenie de Franval receives her training from her
incestuous father, who follows the model of Rousseau's
Emile. The girl is separated early from her
mother, and provided with fresh air, the chance to
exercise, beautiful clothing, and other amenities. She
matures nicely and becomes ready to undergo her
initiation through the rites of education. The pattern of
those rites is already familiar. She receives the stigma
of vice through her realisation that immorality is the
truth of social things.
However, when
Eugenie is brought up the right way, she indeed loves her
father and allows him to seduce her without a trace of
resistance on her part. She is able to reject what Freud
calls the horror of incest. From there she proceeds towards
crueller ideas. By this Sade intends to demonstrate once
again that all innocent moral thought represents merely the
life of the unformed mind, a mind which offers no resistance
whatever to the powers of the corrupt mind. The weaker
spirit takes the stamp from the stronger one. As such, its
original virtue is deceptive. The uneducated mind is a
medium without form of its own, and the libertine has
nothing to gain from the activity of the victim. She is
merely a passive being whose thoughts and actions are random
and meaningless. The libertine creates his own worthless
company as a shadow - a mere reflection of his mature mind.
As Eugenie's stature grows, her independence
advances.
Education is a
transformative process, in short a corruptive process if by
that is meant producing a mind capable of moving beyond the
'innocent' or raw state of so called 'virtue'. Education is
essentially v(o)ice. In this form it is lethal and therefore
successful in the contemporary world. What other forms of
education there are depends upon how seriously narcissistic
dreams of identity as a basis for collaboration are pursued;
and under what rule the real is conceived. It is the rule of
mastery that dominates and frames the conditions for the
illusions of collaboration. Pluralism, multiple cultures,
multiculturalism may all co-exist under the rule through
which globalism achieves mastery of the flows of resources;
but only at a price. If the name of education is to be
employed against the rule, then an exploration of what is at
stake in fading and erasing the limits of the Home Rule is
needed.
Home Is Where The Cooking Is
Levi-Strauss (19) described the universality of his
theme of the 'raw' and the 'cooked'. Cooking symbolises the
processes of enculturation and the cooked symbolised the
cultured as distinct from the uncultured, the raw, or the
uncooked. Education is thus a process of cooking. Every
culture, indeed every home, has its own style, its
characteristic recipes. Schools develop to transmit and so
ensure all are 'home-cooked' in the appropriate way. Indeed,
master teachers found schools of thought through which their
voices can be heard sounding out the recipes for human
transformation from birth to death and beyond.
Judge Schreber, as
mentioned before, heard all the voices. The book he wrote
was a way to make his own voice heard. He too intended to be
a teacher and wanted to make his way home:
I have
decided to apply for my release from the Asylum in the
near future in order to live once again among civilised
people and at home with my wife. It is therefore
necessary to give those persons who will then constitute
the circle of my acquaintances, an approximate idea at
least of my religious conceptions, so that they may have
some understanding of the necessity which forces me to
various oddities of behaviour, even if they do not fully
understand these apparent oddities
p.
41
To live at home
people would have to be instructed in his views so he could
be accepted. It was necessary to make the prevailing Home
Rule accept the new Home Rule - a form of collaboration, or
at least a collaborative tolerance one might say. More than
that, he had a great educational gift to bestow upon the
scientific community and thence to the world at large. It
was a knowledge of the entire World Order, by which he
meant:
the
natural bond which holds God and mankind together;
wherever the Order of the World is broken, power alone
counts, and the right of the stronger is decisive.
(p.
78)
The new Home Rule
was nothing less than the World Order itself. A view, not
too dissimilar from that held by most Right thinking
politicians and was perhaps what Reagan and Thatcher had in
mind during the Gulf War after the fall of the Berlin Wall
set in motion the short lived political myth of a New World
Order. There is nothing like a just or holy war to turn
hearts and minds to thoughts of home, identity and the
collaborative pedagogy of the V(o)ice of Law, Conscience and
Surgical Strikes. It was, one might say, a truly
collaborative enterprise, a multi-ethnic triumph of shared
values (c.f. Schostak 1993), a melting pot of globalist
proportions, where the stronger was indeed, decisive. To
have a voice in the melting pot requires a spell in the
cauldron.
A Spell in the Seething Cauldron
If voice is to have meaning and to have effects, it
becomes structured like a language - instrumental, that is,
musical, functional, creative, reproductive. If that is so,
then the voice is never quite inside and always somewhat
possessed. In thinking of the original state before voice
lost its innocence to language Freud, of course, saw it as a
seething cauldron. No reason to believe him, but one myth is
as good as another when thinking of beginnings where the
Word was not.
Psychoanalysis can
be thought of as a collaborative pedagogy to produce a
confrontation with the real in the interests of transforming
another little bit of the seething cauldron into a semblance
of rationality. For that, as anyone knows, a spell is
required. The talking cure is carried out in little spells
of time defined by money, the ability to pay, or cough up.
That is the letter of the Law, the Home Rule, the World
Order. What is ultimately coughed up are the transferences
between analysand and analyst. It is the basis of the
collaborative construction of the fantasy which organises,
sustains and motivates the restless search for someone who
knows, someone to pay, and to pay back. The profit for Freud
in his dealings with the economy of transferences between
himself and his clients was that through them, in the early
days at least, he could test out his developing theories.
The theories, perhaps might be called a kind of surplus
value transfered from the one arena to the other, for the
purposes of the other in a world of global competition where
winning means some kind of virtual or textual immortality
for the identity: becoming the 'father of psychoanalysis'
and through him all his disciples write in his name. If
there is some analogous way of thinking the world order,
then how may the 'father' of it be thought. Clearly not as
an individual, like Freud. Although dictators arise who may
cloak themselves in the mantle of gods, the 'text' if it can
be called that, which sustains the world order is a kind of
collaboration 'written' always elsewhere since no one person
can claim authorship. On the local scale it may be thought
in terms of us and them. On the National scale this us and
them turn out to be enemies of the state, of the
father/motherland. On the global scale us and them become
harder to define. Multinational companies transcend such
borders, even transcend limited company loyalties in that
ownership is always shifting and there are multiple levels
of ownership. Perhaps there is some notion here of transfer
value from one sector to another, from one illusory Home
Land to another where only the Masters of the Global Order
win; and the citizens of homelands are like the beasts
available for butchery according to the pleasure of Sade's
libertines.
Something of the
nature of that transfer value might be approached through
the four discourses Lacan described: those of the master,
the university , the hysteric and the analyst. One might say
these offer four forms of pedagogic collaboration for
subjectivity to come in(to) being. It is the value of the
coming, the pleasure or enjoyment of the real that is
somehow put into circulation through symbolic mastery of the
real and collected by those in the dominant position. Of
course, there can be no collaboration if there is no radical
heterogeneity; otherwise there is no difference for
collaboration to matter. This radical difference is always
between the symbolic and the real. The dumb of the real are
exploited or slaughtered by the educated of the
symbolic.
The discourse of
the master allows no interrogation, demands obedience to the
Law, that is, the master. There is no other voice. There is
no other-as-voice, not even as echo. The voice of the master
fills all without gap. Giving a voice to the other can only
be an act of ventriloquism for the pleasure of the master.
It has no need of another to provide the foundation for
knowledge, faith, belief, love, action. And yet there is
collaboration. It is with the being (or the real) of the
voiceless-other, the beast that screams in pain, not the
symbolic pain, nor the pain made representable through the
voice, but the pain that overshoots all words, all ability
of voice to voice. It is the real of the body that screams,
as the babe screams at birth with the shock of
breath:
In Sade's
world, pain comes close to being the essence of pleasure
by providing an orgiastic rush into the void through
collapsing mental barriers. If pain is inflicted on a
victim, the master's pleasure stays at the symbolic
level. Sadism is fictional, since only my own pain is
physically verifiable. Therefore the masters are ready to
suffer themselves. Julliette is happy to accept whippings
at any time during her apprenticeship, and at Silling the
masters are whipped regularly until their skin is
toughened like old leather. The masters enjoy the pain;
their victims do not. The masters love the excrement
their victim produces and hates. The meal is disgusting,
but it is precisely this repulsion that creates the limit
whose transgression is the source of what Sade calls
pleasure.
(Airaksinen
1995: 89)
What is mastered is
the jouissance of the body, that old Id as Freud called it,
the seething cauldron, the polymorphously perverse sexuality
of the babe at birth before education exacts its price. The
world of the libertine who has pleasure in an unjust world
is built upon the transgression through which jouissance
erupts, disrupting the virtues, the social norms and laws
through which the jouissance of the virtuous or the victim
has been drained of its life. This transgression is only
experienced if there are laws to be transgressed. The
eruption of jouissance is not the transgression, it is its
effects of disrupting the laws, or setting one set of laws
against another. It is the collaboration of the
slaughterhouse, the concentration camp, ethnic cleansing,
rationally organised, its masters educated in all the
techniques of cutting to slice into the sharp chords of the
body. Above all, the master's pleasure must be real, not
fictional - the orchestration of masters with the dumb
collaboration of the herd: for that there is required the
further collaboration of yet others, to produce a labour of
pain, of disgust, of sacrifice, of butchery - a Sadeian
economics which places at the disposal of the masters their
means to procure pleasure of surplus value without thought
of cost. Who are these others?
In the discourse of
the university, the whole edifice of Sadeian economics is
rendered expert, rationalised and justified. This is the
discourse of philosophies, rhetorics and sciences which
intentionally or naively school public opinion rather than
educate it (Schostak 1993, 1996). Their pragmatic and
analytic rules of reflection never compromise, never shatter
- in the interest of many collaboratively agreed balances -
the foundations of commonsense, the operating principles of
social order, the mechanisms of capital flow and
accumulation. The collaborative voice of the discourse of
the university never stands alone:
(the
judge's) authority and immunity depend upon the
assumption that he speaks with the mouth of others.... He
must pose as a kind of oracle, voicing the dictates of a
vague divinity.... Yet the customary law of
English-speaking peoples stands, a structure indubitably
made by the hands of generations of judges, each
professing to be a pupil, yet each in fact a builder who
has contributed his few bricks and a little mortar, often
indeed under the illusion that he has added nothing. A
judge must manage to escape both horns of this dilemma:
he must preserve his authority by cloaking himself in the
majesty of an overshadowing past; but he must discover
some composition with the dominant trends of his
time.
The tireless
builders of the university whether they work in courtrooms,
schools, hospitals, newspapers have but one goal: to
collaborate under the letter of the law of their discipline,
their code of practice to preserve the connection between a
past, a present and a future which can be called 'knowledge'
based upon evidence. The function of this knowledge is
ultimately to justify and preserve the 'majesty of an
overshadowing past' which in turns murders the radically
heterogeneous. If the judge stands as a builder in the guise
of a pupil, who is the master? The master escapes judgement
by being above all possible judgement. All law is in the
interests of the master. But who is this lurking in an
overshadowing past?
Schreber as a judge
knew about such things. He was the best of reflective
practitioners, he kept a journal, formed hypotheses and
tested them against experience, drawing upon triangulated
evidence. Indeed he tested his reason in a court of law and
won. He formed an understanding of the whole World Order
behind which of course was God as its creator. In the court
of Freud behind this God was pronounced the father of
Schreber and instead of the World Order was founded a theory
of paranoia - which in itself may be thought of as the Way
of the World Order. This is essentially the way of the
incomplete master. It is Schreber's great discovery, his
teaching that was overlooked by all.
Overlooking -
The Way of the Incomplete Master
Both Sade and Judge Shreber's father advocated
systematic inspection, the first as a technique of pleasure
the second as a technique of control and the formation of
respect; of course, the first and the second amount to the
same thing. Sade's libertines count their pleasures,
designing the minutiae of behaviour, staging it with
precision. Schreber's father was also a stickler for the
detail prescribing how the babes were to lie when asleep,
the times they were to eat, the directions their eyes should
point, the posture of their bodies when sat. He had
instruments to ensure their bodies, the heads, their eyes
were correctly positioned (Schatzman 1971). Later the son
would write of the effects of these instruments and of his
father's surveillance techniques as miracles employed to rob
him of his reason, to 'unman' him, to commit soul
murder.
All
attempts at committing soul murder, at unmanning me for
purposes contrary to the Order of the World (that is to
say for the sexual satisfaction of a human being) and
later at destruction of my reason, have failed. From this
apparently unequal battle between one weak human being
and God Himself, I emerge, albeit not without bitter
sufferings and deprivations, victorious, because the
Order of the World is on my side.
(p.78)
This is because as
he explains in a note 'God cannot achieve what contradicts
His own attributes and His powers in relation to mankind or,
as in my case, to an individual human being who has entered
into a special relation with Him'. Hence, God is an
incomplete master, that is, he has limitations. As Shreber
records throughout his book, God does not understand
individuals and cannot deal with all the details.
A long
time ago I formulated the idea that God cannot learn by
experience, in written notes as follows: "Every
attempt at an educative influence directed outwards must
be given up as hopeless "; every day which has since
passed has confirmed the correctness of this opinion.
(p.
155)
And God has been
led to believe that Schreber threatens his existence. This
is why God has been drawn into attempting Schreber's soul
murder through such strategies as the 'writing down
system'
It is so
obstinately held that I have become stupid to such a
degree that day after day one doubts whether I still
recognize people around me, whether I still understand
ordinary natural phenomena, or articles of daily use or
objects of art, indeed even whether I still know who I
am or have been. The phrase "has been recorded" with
which I was examined, follows when my gaze has been
directed towards certain things and I have seen them;
they are then registered on my nerves with this phrase.
For example, when I saw the doctor my nerves immediately
resounded with "has been recorded", or , "a joint of pork
- has been recorded" and especially the phrase
"Senatsprasident - has been recorded", etc. All this goes
on in endless repetition day after day, hour after hour.
Incredible scriptu I would like to add, and yet
everything is really true, however difficult it must be
for other people to reconcile themselves to the idea that
God is totally incapable of judging a living human being
correctly; even I myself became accustomed to this idea
only gradually after innumerable observations.
(p.
188)
Thus:
That God
cannot claim infallibility since He entered into a
relationship with me which is contrary to the Order of
the World, is proved to my satisfaction, as He
himself must have determined the whole policy pursued
against me, and thus have started the systems of
writing-down, not-finishing-a-sentence,
tying-to-celestial-bodies etc.
(p.198)
What peace is there
in a world of total surveillance? Who can speak there and
make the sound of the voice heard but the master who hides
behind all surveillance apparatus? If there is a peace, it
is the peace of those who are nothing but the
herd.
For Sade there is
no one World Order God, only those educated to be masters in
a world dominated by Nature where as Airaksinen summarises
it:
Man has no
relationship to Nature, nor Nature to man; Nature cannot
bind man in any law, man is in no way dependent upon
Nature, neither is answerable to the other, they cannot
either harm or help each other.
(1995:58)
And in this world
masters cannot trust masters. Although Juliette grows to
love a friend Clairwil, she hears of a plot against her life
that Clairwil has developed and thus poisons her friend.
This is not therefore the One God World Order but the
predatory Multiple Master Global Order of pleasure, fear,
deceit, betrayal. In this latter Order, Nature has no
preference over who will win, indeed, is indifferent to the
whole game. The Schreberian God is not the Sadean master.
Yet, their incompleteness leads to murderous intent: two
faces of Thanatos.
The Timid
Voice
Incompleteness offers the hope of challenge. The one who
is supposed to know is proven to be fallible. Lacan's
discourse of the hysteric continually challenges the one
supposed to know to prove the basis for the knowledge. No
theory is good enough, never explains the one exception that
is always the hysteric. In short, no knowledge is so
encompassing that it explains reality. All shared knowledge
is but a collaboration in illusion covering over a deathly
gap. How to voice this gap? Lacan eventually began to see
the discourse of the hysteric as the true voice of science,
never satisfied with pre-established knowledge, always
questioning, always pointing to the anomaly, the
contradiction, the confusion, the belief without basis (c.f.
Fink 1995).
Where Schreber
organises his experience into a totalising religion of the
World Order with its Incomplete God, ineducable and
contemplating soul murder, Sade organises it into the
pleasure and betrayal of libertines and the butchery and
exploitation of dumb animals under the indifference of
Nature, the hysteric cries out for a knowledge that can
never be accepted, the timid voice parachutes to a place of
safety. Above all what is yearned for by the timid voice is
collaboration, negotiation, solidarity, co-operation. If
there are enough voices, timidity can be raised to a roar;
or as Schreber knew only too well, to fragmented, repetitive
voices droning on, robbing him of his sleep and his reason.
Otherwise, timidity can at least whisper in the shadow of
the master and hope not to be heard. The timid may be
thought of as the incomplete hysteric, as the hysteric can
be thought of as the failure to accept the lack of knowledge
as the basis for discovery, exploration, jouissance and the
emergence of subjectivity.
Both the timid and
the libertine transgress: the first for safety, the second
for pleasure. There is no transgression without having
boundaries to cross; just as there is no collaboration
without parties who reach across a difference. These
boundaries are set in place either through fear of the
overshadowing past or because it is the only way to screw
some pleasure from an indifferent world. It leads either to
strategies of mastery or to a self defeating politics of
residuals. The timid, like the hysteric, point to what is
left out by knowledge, by mastery but rather than confront
head on seek balanced views, work progressively,
asymptotically to the goal of desired inclusion. It is a
politics of residuals seeking to be included, but not all at
once, not if it causes a problem, and only through rational
assent, shared values in a democratic community of discourse
where all minority views are represented. The fear is of
going too far. Words always transgress the conscious
intention of the timid, revealing too much of both a
personal and an impersonal unconscious. What is too far is
the upheaval wrought by contents that cannot be handled by
the strategic plays of politics. If politics is the art of
the possible, upheaval presents the impossible. That is why
it is not for the timid and can only be faced, not with
collaboration whether democratic or not, but with
silence.
The Silence of the Voice
Psychoanalysis is the talking cure only because of the
silence of the voice. It is a different kind of slaughter
and its effects can either be radical or conservative. For
Lacan the strategy of the analyst can only to be to remain
silent, to refuse to give the seeker after the
master-knowledge what is wanted, and thus produce in the
other the kinds of uncertainty that leads to a questioning
which draws upon the unconscious, the real, the
silence.
For Boothby (1991)
the ego as an illusory structure of unity, of identity is
brought under attack from all the repressed, or left out
contents that cannot be or have not been admitted into the
unifying identity. It feels like death. It is perhaps an
explanation of the persecutory tenor of everyday life. The
voices of the social order are monotonous, instructional and
banal just as Schreber experienced them in his world of
souls, temporary beings and God. Schreber felt his soul
being eroded, there was a plot to kill it. Sade saw no other
way of enjoyment in an injust world dominated by an
indifferent Nature than through the mastery of the libertine
whose pleasure was the transgression of virtue and the
torture, butchery and murder of the virtuous, the dumb
beasts. The v(o)ice of Sade is perhaps the other side of the
voices of Schreber.
The silence of the
analyst disrupts both. They function only with a presumption
of collaborative order. For Sade it is the order through
which enjoyment can find its bearings and can extract the
pleasure of destruction. Without such order there is no
orgiastic transgression. For Shreber it was the World Order
of the Incomplete God whose incompleteness was the
foundation of his madness. Without out the order sustained
through the two sides of v(o)ice there can only be the
silence of being, the silence of the real that does not
depend upon the existence of voice. It is a sound more like
a baby at the first inbreath of air. It is the zero point of
the v(o)ice, the hole of the real. Wrapped around it are
placed boundaries, the cordon sanitaire of symbolic
existence which name it, tame it and then cook it. In the
absence of the raw there is no longer a need for the
hygienic cover and it becomes voice, the order of the voices
schooled in the recipes of virtue. The strategy of Sade is
to re-evoke raw pleasure through an education of the vice
necessary to transgress and thus re-educate the bracketing
out of the hole through mastery and produce it as orgiastic
pleasure.
The Home
Coming
Only strategies of disturbance through which jouissance
is the inbreath for a creative subjectivisation which
dissolves the lines of transgression can bring about
transformations which turn the majesty of the mastering-past
into a mist breathed onto a pane of glass and rubbed off. It
is a home coming of sorts. There is no going back once
language has taken hold. It is not a search for roots, for
home, for identity. All that is a symptom. But there is a
home coming. The sense of the real is not the same after the
working of language as before language webbed its way into
the whole being of the individual. But the real has not gone
away. Its substance is a hole in language. That is, language
cannot contain it like the real bucket can contain real
water. The home coming is not effected through language. It
is a meeting at the level of the real of the being of others
in an embrace which language can neither join nor
separate.
To contact
author:
John
Schostak
School of Education and Professional Development
University of East Anglia
email:
j.schostak@uea.ac.uk.
REFERENCES
Airaksinen, T.
(1995) The Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, London
and New York: Routledge
boothby, r. (1991) death and desire. psychoanalytic
theory in Lacan's return to Freud, London and new York:
Routledge
Fink, B. (1995) The Lacanian Subject. Between language
and Jouissance, Princton, New Jersey
Levi-Strauss, C (1966) The Raw and the Cooked, Penguin
Schatzman, M (1971) Soul Murder. Persecution in the Family,
London, Allen Lane
Schostak, J. F. (1993) Dirty Marks. The Education of
Self, Media and Popular Culture, London, Boulder:
Pluto
Schostak, J. F. (1996) 'Teacher education: notes towards a radical view',
in: McBride, R., Teacher Education Policy: Issues arising from Research
and Experience Falmer, Lewes
Schreber, D. P. (1955) Memoirs Of My Nervous Illness,
trans Ida MacAlpine and Richard A, Hunter; W. M. Dawson and
Sons Ltd
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