Question for a framework
Bruno
Julia Evans
Sadeian power, the UK Government……… & CON-sultations by Julia Evans on February 3, 2012 or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=232
The Sadeian position in Jacques Lacan’s Seminar X & LacanianWorks posts by Julia Evans on January 16, 2012 or here http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=235
The Government as Sadeian experimenter
by Julia Evans on August 17, 2011
Two reasons for this post:
1) the invention of a stage on which to act &
2) what those in the sadistic position desire
I started my morning by being reminded that, forty years ago, Professor Philip Zimbardo set up the famous prison experiment at Stanford University to discover the psychological effects of getting students to play the roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison building[i]. From my rough transcript[ii] the following points can be made:
Both the Guards and Prisoners are stripped of their identities via their clothing. Further the prisoners, as in the Third Reich, are reduced to a number. Their subjectivity is removed and not recognised.
Zimbardo: 2nd day, it was a prison created in the minds of each prisoner, each guard and the staff.
Guard: I made the decision to take on the persona of a sadistic guard….
Z: I kept looking for the limits at what point would they say ‘no’ this is just an experiment I have had enough……
P: …there was no-one rational at the head so I started to refuse food
Z draws the female researcher’s gaze to the line-up
She breaks the gaze and leaves.
Guard?: But that the majority of us, can get seduced into behaving in ways that are atypical of everything we believe we are.
So what is going on? Zimbardo’s phantasy, the prison, is created in the minds of all. They make decisions of how to play on Zimbardo’s stage. There is nothing limiting their behaviour so they go beyond & beyond &…
We all create conceptual frameworks so we can play parts. Marcus du Sautoy examines some of these frameworks in his BBC programme ‘The Code[iii]. So these codes enable us to predict – predictions which can fail.
Now in this experiment, the stage is set by the experimenter, Zimbardo. This process is described by Lacan in Seminar X : January 16th 1963[iv]. And whether there are limits is controlled by the experimenter acting as sadist.
Why sadist? The sadist produces .. Lacan[v] (Seminar X January 16th 1963): ‘this dissociation, that it (the sadist) aims essentially at introducing in the other, by imposing on him up to a certain limit, that which cannot be tolerated, at the exactly adequate limit where there manifests itself, where there appears in the other this division, this gap there is between his existence as subject and what he undergoes, what he can suffer in his body.’ … ‘his essential existence as subject with respect to this anxiety, this is what the sadistic desire wants to make vibrate.’ So the sadist, by controlling this stage, wants to make anxiety vibrate in the other[vi].
The experimenter behaves as if he is neutral to the process. He takes the Government’s scientific evaluation position. Lacan[vii]: ‘It is not today or yesterday that intervening for example during one of our scientific meetings on some phenomena which were brought to us – I cannot go over them again today – concerning the creation of experimental neurosis, I pointed out to the one who was communicating his researches, that his own presence in the experiment as a human person, manipulating a certain number of things around the animal, should at one or other moment of the experiment, be put in question, taken into account.’
The limits to the stage is not recognised by the experimenter or players[viii]. Lacan: ‘This phenomenon of edge, in what opens like this window on privileged occasions, marks the illusory limit of this world of recognition, of the one that I call the stage.’
It takes someone speaking from outside this systematic enjoyment, the female researcher, to bring normality or the ‘name of the father’ into the ‘prison’. In Pierre Naveau’s comments on ‘Philosophy in the Boudoir’, it is the Mother who introduces the ‘name of the father’.
So how does this help with the riots or the Government’s imposition of rules and regulating into Education, Health, Social Care, Child Protection, and so on?
If you take a Sadeian position – the experimenter’s position – it is not value free or independent. And the rules and regulations form a stage on which human beings will strip off their subjectivity and take on the clothing the Government provides – see Skills for Health competencies for Psychological Therapies or the HPC’s fitness-to-practice regulations. They will then implement them to please the Ruler. Thus subjectivity and difference go missing. Yes and the rioters were also behaving in a Sadeian system of enjoyment. There were no limits because the network of relationships has been broken and they re not included.
Julia Evans
Mail to: je.la...@icloud.com
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