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Sad(e) Domains: undermining philosophies of Knowledge Truth and Destiny in educational research
What is the contemporary scene of action and cultural experience? It is more than a form of mastery that generates exploitative practices. It is the production of a kind of surplus which exhausts, drains and leaves a yearning void. It is a domain of exhaustive computations where desire is organised as infinitely iterable practices at one level and absolute freedom to pursue desire at another. Sad(e) domains, as I call them, can only be understood at a level of global decision making having local impact for individual pleasure. They are produced through a kind of Cartesian sense of self where knowledge and action take place without God or any other external limit to keep it in checkmate. In this domain the rule is that of pain that seeks transformation into ultimate pleasure. Ultimate pleasure is defined as that which wholly fills the yearning gap. And this can only be a world totally ordered to meet the demand to fill that gap.
If this is too abstract think of role of policy formulated by The World Bank, the G8, by multinationals in terms of their implicit, perhaps explicit desire to frame or contruct the Ultimately Ordered Society. It was for a time after the fall of the Berlin Wall named the New World Order. What sort of new world order is this? Perhaps it looks very much like the old ambition for the marketisation of the world:The number of transnational corporations is now estimated at 37,000 world-wide. These companies control a third of all private-sector assets and have sales of $5.5 trillion, comparable to the US gross national product (GNP).
(The Commission on Global Governance 1995:172)
The society being described here is not one composed of individuals as individuals all having equally valued needs, interests, talents and so on. Rather it is a society composed of ‘classes’, the General Public, Informed Opinion, The Silent Majorities, and so on. At this level society is wholly fictitious but also in policy terms ‘real’. It is real in that it is available for manipulation and calculation. In this sense it is the Ultimate Other, that which exists, pursues a logic that can only be hypothesized and tested but never ‘covered’ in its totality. The Sadean Libertine seems to me to be in a quest to become the incarnation of this Other, having total dominion.
Now think of the global moguls who seek to ‘have their ways’ with those territories that evoke their desire either because they have key physical resources or because they poosess cheap exploitable labour. Or think again of how any totalising system, whether it is market based, political or religious seeks to obliterate the alternative, and impose order not merely by overt physical force but by the more pernicious processes of internalisation engendered by ‘teachings’. Again, as Webster remarks:
.. we need to recognise that democracy itself is not synonymous with liberty and that in some very important respects it is antipathetic to liberty. for democracies are not built on accumulated layers of freedom; they are built upon the rule of law, which in its turn consists in the selective deprivation of freedom. In this respect it is quite wrong to see some absolute disjunction between totalitarian societies and democracies. The relationship between the two forms of government was perhaps best illuminated by one of George Orwell’s remarks, in which he observed that the perfect totalitarian society was one whose citizens were so drilled to conformity that there was not need for a police force. The citizens of such a perfect totalitarian state would presumably be free in all outward respects. They would be free to express subversive opinions and formulate ‘revolutionary’ philosophies because these would almost certainly turn out to be disguised forms of authoritarianism.
(Webster 1990: 48)
Webster later suggests that democracy is what totalitarian states collapse into and that ‘to a very large extent the history of .. freedom is a history of internalised repression.’ (p. 49)
The Sad(e) domain, as I have called it, then, is very much an internalised presence in its ‘democratic’ form and totalitarian in its external form. Currently we are witnessing globalising powers organising terrestrial as well as spatial spheres of such domination increasingly though communications technology and media empires. They are mapping the world according to their desires. These are what I call Sad(e) domains. They construct in a very physical way what elsewhere Benhabib calls the Transsubjective, or the thinker-observer that is implied at the final legitimating source:
From Adam Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand” to Hegel’s concept of a “system of needs,” Durkheim’s notion of the organic division of labour, and Parsons’ notion of “generalised media,” modern social theory has emphasised this aspect of modern societies, according to which large domains of social life become functionally dependent upon one another without this being willed, desired, or even known to anyone.
(Benhabib 1986: 127)
However, the Transsubjective in the Sad(e) domain is not some abstract construct as in the economic notion of the “invisible hand”, nor is it some supposed deity “behind” the workings of the universe, ultimate guarantor of order and dispenser of rewards and punishments.
In the Sad(e) domain the Transsubjective is incarnated as the multibillionnaire empire builder, the directors of multi- or transnational businesses. They are the lawgivers, the dispensers of rewards and punishments. That they are themselves subject to the workings of the world of the masses is the focus of their regret, the focus of their strategic games of domination and the focus of their desire. That ultimately they cannot be satisfied fully and for all time renders the domain sad.
The hatred Sade’s heroes feel against their victims is understandable when one considers the disappointment the heroes go through when they are threatened by loneliness and the bittersweet medicine of narcissism. They hate their victims because victims never provide them with the fulfillment of desire.
(Airaksinen 1991:114)
The solution of course may be simply that the control mechanisms are not powerful or efficient enough. In that case it is a matter of inserting into the system better instruments of surveillance able to measure and correct the slightest deviation from a goal.
Instruments of Control.
Morton Schatzman described the instruments of control employed by the then renowned educationist who was the father of Judge Schreber who wrote a celebrated book which was later analysed by Freud to develop his theories on paranoia. Here the instruments of repression were quite clear and highly behaviourist. More contemporary behavioural theories of learning through the rigourous control of behaviour may be more subtle. Nevertheless, they merely follow Webster’s principle that contemporary freedom is simply internalised repression.
The 1960s generally for the British and Americans was a time when the uneasy peace between welfare and market economics was rocked by the demands of youth for increasing personal freedoms. For the conservative parties in the UK and the USA the 1960s have mythically come to symbolise the ever present fear of subversion and revolution from what Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s called the ‘enemies within’. Much that has happened in politics generally and education in particular in the UK has stemmed from a powerful rejection by the authorities of everything that the 1960s has come to symbolise. I have elsewhere described the impact of the 1960s on educational and political developments in the 1980s employing a particular rhetoric of ‘family values’ (Schostak 1993). Here, Melanie Phillips in a long article explaining why she is moving from the Guardian to the Sunday Times and is still and has always been a socialist despite apparent Rightwing beliefs and attacks on the Left writes of identity politics, society and education:
The world is changing. People are realising the damage being done by a culture which has put self first. Older people are horrified by its trashy transience and self-centredness. Many young people are turning away from the values of their parents’ generation, the Sixties adolescents who never grew up and who abandoned them under the guise of ‘liberal’ freedoms.
....
Behind all the arguments about welfare, family, education and culture lies the fundamental question: where should the moral boundaries for a liberal society be set?(The Observer August 23, 1998)
Efficiency and quality are the contemporary names, or alibis, for the reintroduction
of moral boundaries and the development of instruments of control. They are
everywhere. In schools they can be seen in the OFSTED reports, the National
Curriculum demands, the league tables ranking schools according to their effectiveness
in passing examinations. In Universities they can be seen in the Research Assessment
Exercises and the quality inspections of courses. In health they can be seen
in the health audit trails, the patient satisfaction audits, the league tables
for waiting lists, mortality and so on. In business at large they can be seen
in the bandwagon terms such as total quality management or the need to assure
investors or clients or indeed the government that they are indeed high quality
organisations. Hence there are such criteria as advertising one’s organisation
as possessing the Investors in People award. Then, of course, there is the contemporary
demands for life long learning which ties individuals into continually updating
their skills; or the concept of the ‘learning organisation’ as being
flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances. Often these are simply code
words for shifting the burden of education onto the individual, or for encouraging
the acceptance of increasingly short term employment contracts where ‘outsourcing’
means reducing the numbers of employees of a given firm who then compete with
each other to take on short term contracts. The combined effect is to internalise
controls under a rhetoric of personal choice, responsibility and shifting decision
making away from apparent centralised control and towards apparent individual
control.
Alongside this pressure towards internalising control under the name of self responsibility, life long learning and freedom of decision making has been the globalisation of control in a form sufficient to render individual nation states vulnerable.
The Destabilising Nature of Globalisation.
Centralised structures of control are everywhere being de-stablized in uncertain
ways by an evolving network of electronic mediated communications which has
no centre, and carries only an ideology of technical possibilities. Yet there
is both the germ of nihilism and empowerment here. Empowerment as that which
arises in the cracks, strains and stresses of frozen ideologies, practices and
institutional mechanisms skidding on the grease, the lack of friction where
once there was a firm terrain for organised power to exploit the Other(s). Now
the others, if seen at all, count only as electronic simulations of real (intersubjective)
face to face interactions.
Globalisation is not totalisation, thus it is disinterested in controlling the plays of hermeneutic readings, misreadings, counterreadings. It is disinterested for precisely the reason the science fiction writer Vonnegut gave as to why he could get away with his satires of Capitalist global frameworks dissemination of Americanism: nobody takes any notice. The power of global institutions is the capacity simply to ignore what is being said. What is more important are the structures of ‘connection’ that allows capital to accrue in the hands of the few.
What then is being destabilised is not accrual of capital but the power of voiced-agency to act, to make a difference in how resources and opportunities are allocated and accessed. The consequences of this may first be picked up at the level of an individual’s access to the structures, the mechanisms, the processes of productive, distributive and stratificatory powers. The internet permits individuals to access information from a myriad of sources that are effectively beyond the control of any centralising power. Many consider this a precursor to a radical democracy of individuals able to access information, form alliances and undermine any centralising authority.
The nation state as a coherent and closed entity with its relations with other such states is under threat of destabilisation because its ‘meaning’ in terms of ‘content’ is no longer relevant as the ‘substance’ of the state. The state is no longer a ‘substance’, if it ever were, it is a ‘glimmer’, a square’ on the global chessboard upon which other kinds of global players are at work. There is thus a fundamental loss of power of a certain kind as new players emerge on an internet defined cyberboard which spreads its rapidly shifting matrices of connections over physical space without regard to conventions, cultures and previous powers.
What emerges in these cyberspaces of increasingly sophisticated and ultimately intelligent communications networks are what I call Sad(e) Domains . They are fundamentally experiential and experimental ‘places' analogous to twilight times where all figures are rendered ambiguous and in the half-light the dog (safe, known) cannot be distinguished from the wolf (wild, dangerous, unknown), a place where personal destiny and the 'truth' of things are radically problematised. Mixed with the sadness of the loss of the safe is the danger of desires aroused in the 'half-light' domain that are initially undecidable in terms of their positive or negative (perhaps Sadean) consequences. The solidity of the real is being overwritten in ways which no nolonger require consideration of a stable Truth. What is more important in this domain is a ‘rhetoric of the true’ to generate what Baudrillard and others call truth effects.
Implications for Educational Research
Studying the processes of re-writing the real requires an education of the virtual,
which is capable of exploring a Sadean or Machiavellian desire for lies, a world
of the shady as well as being able to play with possibility in relation to perceived
or socially constructed actualities. The collapse of the real as a stable framework
in the lives of a people inaugurates a play of simulations, fantasies, seductions,
which alternate between:
a) the conscious play of fantasy to incorporate and symbolise what was lost, rejected, forbidden not as extraneous but as integral to desire (Wurtzel 1998) or abject; or
b) seduction through the play of surfaces to create the effect of truth and reality to satisfy desire (e.g., Baudrillard 1976); or
c) a nihilistic carelessness, despair, ‘madness’, panic (Kroker and Cook 1986); or
d) a cyborg transformation into virtuality, nothingness (Gibson 1984)
e) a de-constructive play (Derrida 1976) and intertextuality; or
f) an ironic stance to the world (Rorty 1989); or
g) a post-psychoanalytic reading of the subject in language (Lacan 1977; Kristeva 1983; Irigary 1985)
h) a political dialogic plurality (Benhabib 1986; Mouffe 1993)
How does one move forward from this point? These alternatives draw out (or educate) the outlines of an education of the contemporary. Can we then discern the outlines of how an education that escapes the bureaucratic may be performed? The focus, in each case concerns the relation with ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’, ‘desire’ and the ‘real’ in the construction of an individuality subject to local global structures of communication. Education research which focuses only upon the cultural identity needs of a given nation state or alliance of such states has already been neutralised and rendered redundant. Reduced to being bureaucratic overseers in the governing of schools as centres of league table productivity, educational research is in danger of losing its independence as a force for social critique.
Education has a wider vision than this and education research needs to take on board the greater agenda. How may the individual’s lack of power in Sad(e) domains that I have sketched be transformed through education research based action? The very shadiness and virtuality of Sad(e) domains can become the content that education explores in order to repossess or recuperate the lost agency. As communication based electronic networks increase in sophistication so the degree to which individuals may access information and form networks grows. The ‘reach’ of the individual is in this sense as potentially powerful as any major organisation. What then is missing is simply the wider organising capability of a given individual. Through education the lines of connectivity between individuals can be ‘drawn out’ or ‘educed’, that is ‘educated’.
Each individual and the educational alliances they make with others can be seen as knowledge agents and agencies acting within the rapidly changing patterns of local and global networks. In the following diagram the inner circle of stars can be interpreted as individuals or small networks of individuals combining to create mutual supportive working groups. Each such agency connects with others whose reach extends beyond the limits of the individual to that of larger organisations and regional combinations. These in turn extend into the national and the global multinationals.
There is a major role here for educational research to explore not only the emergent nature of these kinds of relationships, and the ways in which relationships and individuals are politically manipulated but also the ways in which creative possibilities can be developed and explored. Research agendas might ask of the contemporary age of virtual agencies, global communications which now overlay the face-to-face experiences of the material world:
In short, what is the contemporary philosophy underpinning educational action
for a personal and community development and action in the context of global
networks of power? Contemporary education, it seems to me, is increasingly driven
once again by politics and business both at national and global levels. If education
is to come of age and be appropriate for action at personal, local and global
levels its most urgent question is how to underwrite freedom. By grounding freedom
as a personal, social, cultural, political, economic practice, education can
provide a counter to the internalisation of totalitarian and globalising forms
of control endemic to the contemporay scene.
References
Airaksinen, T (1991, 1995) The Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade,
London and New York: Routledge
Benhabib, S. (1986) Critique, Norm, and utopia. A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory, New York: Columbia University Press
Commission on Global Governance (1995) Our Global Neighborhood Oxford, Oxford University Press
Derrida, J. (1976) Of Grammatology, trans. G.C. Spivak, Baltimore, London, Johns Hopkins University Press
Gibson, W. (1984) Neuromancer, New York, Ace Books
Irigaray, L. (1985) This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, Ithaca New York, Cornell University Press
Kristeva, J. (1983) Histoires d’amour, Éditions Deno
Kroker, A., and Cook, D. (1986) The Postmodern Scene, Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics, New York St Martin’s Press
Lacan, J. (1977) Écrits: a selection, trans, Alan Sheridan, London, Tavistock
Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, irony and solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Schostak, J.F. (1993) Dirty Marks. The Education of Self, Media and Popular Culture, London, Boulder Colerado, Pluto Press
Webster, R. (1990) A Brief History of Blasphemy. Liberalism, Censorship and 'The Satanic Verses', Southwold, The Orwell Press.
Wurtzel, E. (1998) Bitch, in praise of difficult women, London, Quartet