Discourses of the Perverse - reading the symptoms, rewriting the future

There is no pure ‘thing’ called democracy. Yet its perversion from an ideal held however
indistinctly by those who yearn to be free of some ‘thing’ that holds them back from
expressing what they feel is their potential, their right, their dream, is a source of anguish,
anxiety, anger and ultimately violence. It suggests a ‘thing’ never quite lost, never quite
found but always a nagging hope of something better that could be achieved if only .. if
only what? Some sense of trying to give shape to the ‘if only’ as a dream of a
democracy of the people has variously been seen recently in the broadly termed Arab
Spring, Occupy and Indignados movements (Ancelovici et al 2016), with arguably a
degree of radical democratic expression in Syriza and Podemos (Hancox 2015), but also
in forms of a rightwing populism as in Trump and Brexit (Inglehart and Norris 2016). In
each case, democracy is typically evoked as a ‘thing’ to increase freedom, give a voice,
increase equality for some particular group, or indeed the ‘people’. Rather than having a
clear and determined meaning, such terms can be deployed as ‘empty signifiers’, that is,
as categories where there is no necessary fixed meaning, rather they are like empty
spaces where there is a contest to place meanings that can occupy the space. Where those
on the political right talk about the freedom of individuals to compete and to win wealth
and privilege, those on the left talk about being ‘left out’, ‘dispossessed’ by the winners
and thus their loss of freedoms and equality of voice to engage in or influence decision
making. Democracy, in all its forms, sets into play discourses about the capacities of
people to engage freely and equally with others in the decisions and forms of
organization that impact upon their lives. At its most radical, democracy may take the
form of an an-archy, that is a state of affairs where there is no leader. This suggests
direct equal participation of all, in all decision making affecting the lives of people.
Typically it is argued that this is impossible in practical terms in all but the smallest and
simplest forms of collective organization (c.f. Lippmann 1927). Hence, various
mediating mechanisms and forms of organization need to be created to fill the gap
between the voices of the many and the few who make and enact policy decisions. In
contemporary ‘democratic’ states these are typically in the form of elected politicians, the
use of experts to provide evidence, and the creation of laws to ensure ‘fairness’ or
‘justice’ and the forms of organization required to enforce them.
Democracy as a historical, practical accomplishment has variously evolved according
to circumstances in different nation states as a pragmatic political form to resolve
disagreements without resorting to violence between the contestants where the strongest
and most ruthless wins. The discourses of democracy do not arise outside of history but
are already inscribed in the struggles for freedom from domination between the richest
and the poorest, the strongest and the weakest. This struggle is encapsulated in the
Hegelian master-slave/servant dialectic. The master is the one with the power of life or
death over the other. That is to say, in more everyday terms the master is signified by or
embodied by any person or form of organisation that is, at least, perceived capable of
ruining the life of another. In contemporary terms, this may be a line manager with the
legitimized power to make ‘hard’ decisions about sacking, redundancy, salary cuts and so
on. The master in this sense is incarnated in any individual with real or imagined power
due to a given position in a hierarchy to harm the wellbeing, exclude, imprison or indeed
at the extreme, to end the life of another. Thus, for example, as described by McCormick
(2006, 2011b) and Rosanvallon (2012) early democratic revolutionaries advocated
adopting an attitude of suspicious and distrust towards those in power and developing
forms of monitoring (or surveillance by an informed public) in order to prevent the abuse
of democratic forms of governance by politicians and the wealthy. Alongside such
suspicion the positive form of democracy – as argued by Spinoza - aspires to create the
conditions where the powers of all reach their fullest expression to the benefit of all. In
both approaches, the discourses of democracy become perverted to the extent that the
voices of some overrule, marginalise or indeed silence the voices of others in the
development and dissemination of knowledge, the debates that ground evidence and
express alternative views as to the good society, the production of evidence and the
making of decisions that affect all. For Dewey, it is when the consequences of private
decision making adversely affect the lives of others that the demand is made for public
structures, mechanisms and representatives to be put into place to address the
consequences. However, rather than public action being limited to a democracy of
addressing consequences, the more Spinozan approach argues for a democracy where
powers and potentials are creatively explored. Both are critical if the discourses of
democracy are not to be perverted. To achieve both dimensions to democracy the
following will argue that there must be the freedom to critique, imagine alternatives and
to equalize the powers of decision making and action throughout the organisations of
everyday life. This requires being alert to the discourses that seek to dominate whether
through overt force or more subtly through techniques of seduction, misdirection and the
nuancing and displacement of meanings; as well as having the courage to engage in the
radical aspect of democracy that entails creating forms of governance in all the
organisations and practices of everyday life to deliver both freedom and equality for all.
The tensions to be addressed by democracy, if it is to survive as a force for the
wellbeing of all, are seen in the resurgence of various populisms whether in their left or
right political forms, whether from movements created as a groundswell of direct
participation, or as audiences, fans and followers of charismatic leaders, or demagogues.
Such tensions between ground up movements seeking to bring about social, political and
economic freedoms, and elites manipulating discontent by striving to reinforce inequality
have been the dynamic underwriting Western forms of governance since the key
revolutions of political modernity in France, America and Saint-Domingue, now called
Haiti (Rosanvallon 2013).
There is then an intimate connection between freedom and equality that has been
encapsulated in Balibar’s (1994) concept of égaliberté (equaliberty). Any inequality
favouring one individual or group or class necessarily reduces the freedom of the others.
Democracy, in that sense, is both a political and social form of organisation that bases the
freedom of all on each person’s right to engage in decision making. The radical
implications of this power to engage in decision making in all forms of social
organisation has been systematically targeted by elites by embodying what is called here
the discourses of the perverse and explored through Lacan’s four discourses: the master,
the university, the hysteric, and the analyst. Each of these discourses create perverse
conditions that erode the intimate relation between freedom and equality.
Capitalist elites have been largely successful in perverting the discourses of equality
and freedom fundamental to democracy as a society of equals (see Schostak in this
special issue) and to education. A key elite strategy, as writers such as Klein
(2007) have argued, has been to take advantage of the shock generated by crises, to
accumulate wealth and power. The anxiety and fear produced facilitates control by
weakening populations thus rendering them more pliable to the ‘solutions’ provided by
neoliberal and neoconservative discourses. Rather than the suddenness of shock, there
are also the continuous pressures of neoliberal precarity policies applied by post-financial
crisis governments that have reinforced market de-regulation and privatisation, along
with a pervasive media rhetorics blaming the unemployed and the poor calling them lazy
and benefits scroungers. This has been compounded by blaming immigrants for placing a
burden on welfare and health services, and for being cheap labour taking the jobs of local
people. These are perverse strategies, that is, strategies that turn attention away from the
exploitation of populations by the wealth and power elites who occupy the place of power
in order to inscribe their victims as the cause of contemporary social malaise and the ruin
of once great nations and peoples.
The question then is: how can people occupy the place of power in order to bring
about a culturally creative world able to deliver benefits for all without prejudice to any?
To find an answer involves a challenge to the contemporary coercive and seductive
discourses deployed by those who currently occupy the place of power and incarnate the
discourses of mastery. To rewrite the present in the light of chosen futures, it is argued
requires a challenge to the master in all ‘his’ guises. This challenge is essentially an act of
education, a drawing out of powers to address the symptoms of a democracy denied.

Into the Place of the Master

It is easy to see the master as an all powerful, or at least an extraordinarily powerful,
person. At its extreme this may be seen in the figure of the sovereign, the one who
Schmitt (2005) defined as having ultimate decision making power over life and death.
Schmitt’s political philosophy was influential in the rise of Nazism in Germany and has
continued to be influential in terms of his advocating a ‘friend-enemy’ politics. This
approach to politics was adopted by Leo Strauss whose influence has been a fundamental
dimension of neo-conservative national and international politics from the Thatcher-
Regan era (Norton 2004) to the present use of it, by for example Donald Trump as a
‘populist ploy’ (McCormack 2017) or the politicians leading and then implementing the
strategy to leave the European Union, Brexit (c.f. Morgan 2016). It is not, however,
simply the great or divinely appointed leader or leadership elite that is significant in the
exercise of power. Rather, for example, Kristol influentially argued that the “American
peoplewere not as liberal as their ruling overlords, and that the right leader could use the
democratic process to overthrow them. This new leader, in keeping with the views of
Schmitt and Strauss, would then impose a national religion on America, thus unifying the
country and saving it from the moral disintegration of liberalism” (McCormack 2017). In
particular for Schmitt, writing in praise of America as a sovereign nation:

It is an expression of true political power if a great people [can] determine on its

own the forms of speech and even the mode of thought of other peoples, the
vocabulary, the terminology and the concepts.
(Schmitt 1933: 44)

The place of the leader/sovereign/master, thus, is created whenever discourses are

deployed in relation to the forms of organisation and the material, symbolic, intellectual
and emotional resources necessary to carry discursively articulated demands into action.
It is access to such resources – Agamben called them dispositifs (c.f. Schostak and
Schostak 2013) – that enables a particular individual to be incarnated as the or at least a
‘master’. Where the place in question is ‘democratic’, that is, a place that exists to
subject the powers of the few to public scrutiny and decision making, then the individual
who is chosen to occupy it becomes subject to scrutiny in terms of their fitness to occupy
such a place as the elected ‘leader’ of a nation. And by implication there are then
questions as to the fitness of the processes, procedures, and mechanisms that place
individuals into positions that occupy the place from which power is exercised.
When Donald Trump was presidential elect a letter was written by three professors to
President Obama strongly recommending that “in preparation for assuming (Trump’s
responsibilities as president that he) “receive a full medical and neuropsychiatric
evaluation by an impartial team of investigators” (Green 2016). On Monday, 13th
February 2017 Lance Dodes and Joseph Schachter plus 33 others wrote a letter to the
New York Times expressing their concerns as mental health professionals that:

Mr. Trump’s Speech and action demonstrate an inability to tolerate views

different from his own, leading to rage reactions. His words and behaviour suggest
a profound inability to empathise. Individuals with these traits distort reality to
suit their psychological state, attacking facts and those who convey the (journalists,
scientists).
In a powerful leader, these attacks are likely to increase, as his personal myth of
greatness appears to be confirmed. We believe that the grave emotional instability
indicated by Mr. Trump’s speech and actions makes him incapable of serving
safely as president.
(Dodes and Schachter 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/opinion/mental-
health-professionals-warn-about-trump.html?_r=0)

The concerns about mental stability and behaviour continued throughout his presidency
along with investigations into the role of his team in relation to Russian interference in
the election campaign. The ‘powerful leader’ is powerful because of the place occupied
and the legitimating discourses that have been internalised by sufficiently large sections
of populations. Thus, rather than a focus upon the psychologies of leaders, indeed of
Trump as demagogue or of the leaders of the brexit campaign, the more general focus on
discourse is a more fundamental approach to analysing the jostling for positions and
places to be occupied by competing political figures who claim to represent peoples’
‘truths’, ‘facts’, ‘values’ and ‘emotions’. However, it is not so much that a leader is mad,
bad, dangerous but that there are discourses, material structures and processes through
which everyday life is socially organised that contribute to the conditions and
circumstances for such an individual to occupy the position. These preceded the arrival
and remain long after the leader has gone. We are, in effect, born into historically pre-
existing discourses that structure not only the way we talk but through that structuring
influence the ways we perceive the world. For Lacan drawing upon the structural
linguistics of Saussure and others, it is discourse that constructs and defines all
contemporary social relationships – and not vice versa. The discourses that are available
to individuals in that sense predates and thus pre-defines the alternative subject positions
an individual can adopt. At their most general, for example, discourses between
individuals (as agent and recipient in a communication) involve either relations of
hierarchy or of equality. In discourses of the survival of the fittest, the hierarchies are
constructed between the strongest and the weakest and subject identities include
‘winners’ and ‘losers’. It underpins also ideas of ‘meritocracy’: the best rise, and deserve
to do so. By contrast in discourses of co-operation social relations are predicated not
upon the asymmetrical relations of master-servant, boss-employee, leader-led, teacher-
student but the symmetry of mutuality and co-dependency where the work of each
individual is seen to be equally necessary to the creativity, productivity, feasibility and
continuation of the whole (c.f. Dejours and Deranty 2010).
Such discourses then frame how the powers of individuals are organised, utilised or
repressed and whether they are in the service and profit of all, of some, or of one’s self
alone. This notion of powers is used here within its Spinozan heritage as explored
politically by Balibar (1998) and Negri (2004). However, it also has its echo in
psychoanalysis whether as Freud’s Id or in terms of Lacan’s version of being that which
lurks behind speaking, the ‘it’ (ça) that de-centres the subject creating a split-subject ($);
that is, in the terms being discussed here, a subject divided between its bodily powers and
how those powers are discursively articulated as a basis for action in the world. For
Spinoza, these powers include thinking, imagining, feeling, walking on two feet, the
strength of the body and so forth. For him, there is no essential hierarchy of mind over
body as in Descartes, and indeed no split between mind and body. Rather the power of
thought is in itself a power of the body. The mind is an idea of the body. To gain the
greatest benefit from one’s powers means that each must equally be expressed and
developed; otherwise, if a power is suppressed the individual is deprived of the benefit of
that power. Applying this logic socially, all benefit most when the powers of each
individual are developed equally to their fullest potential and can then enjoy the fullest
social expression of all their powers. The ideal then is a democracy of powers expressed
both individually and socially in all forms of organisation, practice and action. To
suppress a power does not mean to say it goes away, that it is simply switched off like a
light. In psychoanalytic terms the ‘switched off’ or ‘cut off’ powers continue an
unconscious life and return or erupt as symptoms. These ‘cut off’ powers may be related
to ‘parts’ of the body that are subject to cultural taboos and prohibitions. For example,
Freud wrote of the body as fragmented into part objects of the body such as breast and
penis as well as bodily waste as being rejected ‘parts’. Lacan extended the list of such
physical objects to the voice, the gaze and the phoneme and generalised them in terms of
an abstract variable employed to represent any object that causes desire, the objet petit a.
There is a shuffling, as it were, as the individual attempts to move from one thing to
another in a search to get fulfilment through the expression of the repressed, cut off,
switched off power(s) that are socially, culturally, politically, legally, religiously denied.
This arguably provides a key strategy for the continual re-creation and maintenance of
mastery by those elites who occupy the place of the master in contemporary forms of
social organisation. There is the continual search for the one thing, person, source of
knowledge and its technologies, form of organisation or method that can satisfy the ever
present sense of lack. The trope – or fantasy - of the unique qualities of the master as
leader or captain of industry as the one capable of providing this is central to the
narratives of elites to justify their privilege. This is illustrated in the writings of Ayn
Rand who influenced people such as Alan Greenspan appointed by President Reagan as
chair of the American federal reserve thus reinforcing the conditions for neoliberal
monetary policy as a global phenomenon. Her influence continues in the Trump
administration and key figures in the digital technologies such as Peter Theil – seen as
Trump’s ‘shadow president’ (Johnson 2017) - creating a sense of what Freedland (2017)
calls the ‘new age of Ayn Rand’. However, such a focus on the unique individual misses
the significance of discourse. Rather than the Atlas figure holding up the world that Rand
admires, it can be argued that it is the world of workers combined with economic, legal
and political forms of organisation that provides the mechanisms to elevate and sustain
the ‘giants’ of politics and industry. The political – and educational – question is how to
bring them down. As La Boetie (1552) long ago argued, it is not the tyrant or leader that
is the problem but the obedience ‘willingly’ given by those who submit at each level in
the hierarchies of power from the tyrant to the lowliest. The power of obedience to the
voice of authority has been controversially illustrated by Milgram’s (1974; Burger 2009;
Haslam et al 2015) experiment to see how far people will follow orders given by
‘experts’ even if it means harm to the point of death. Throughout society, in all its
everyday forms of organisation, there are the experts, whether these are teachers in
schools or the managers, engineers and scientists in their everyday workplaces. It is
indeed an educational issue in terms of whether schools reproduce the conditions for
obedience or create the conditions to critique and challenge what Arendt (1963) called a
banality that underpins the everyday forms of organisation which in her terms can deliver
evil as well as good. Take away everyday obedience and the world of the giants falls – as
illustrated by Zizek (1993) in the case of the overthrow of Ceauçescu when the image of
power fell from him in the eyes of the Romanian people leaving a ‘hole’, an empty space’
where, at least for the moment, anything was possible and revolution could be attained.
What Zizek points to is not the man, but the sustaining fantasy conveyed through
everyday discourses that the man represents. That is, the place of the master is organised
discursively. A discourse is not just a matter of talking to another, or of transmitting
values, knowledge and practices, it critically involves the social forms of organisation
within which that process of talking, or conversing between individuals takes place. In
Zizek’s Lacanian analysis, rather than the discourse of mastery itself being deflated, it is
the individual who embodied it that falls. In Zizek’s logic rather than challenging the
discourse and how it underpins prevailing forms of organisation, the search then is for the
new representative – for Zizek (2013) a ‘Thatcher of the Left’ - who can better fill, or
cover over, the hole in ways that fulfil people’s desires for forms of order, safety and
predictability that enable them to get on with their lives.
Similarly, capitalism in its conflation of markets and democracy occupies the place of
the master with promises to satisfy needs and desires but more subtly than that of an
obvious dictator. The discourses of capitalism exploit fears as well as hopes and hidden
desires in its production of objects that promise fulfilment, pleasure, satisfaction. In
particular, they exploit the thrill of the forbidden, that is those cut off, repressed bits
related to a lack which then can be the focus for manipulative, seductive campaigns to
sell ‘safe’ or disguised substitutes to satisfy the lack. For example, as in the old coca cola
claim that it is the ‘real thing’ capable of satisfying a thirst, a thirst for fun, friendship,
popularity, and attractiveness to a desired partner. Whether in the case of Bernays'
(in)famous slogan to attract women to smoke in public, cigarettes as the ‘torches of
freedom’ (Tye 1998); or, perhaps more contemporaneously, cars as the thrill of freedom
and speed; and in the use of communications technologies as a means for global
communication that facilitate making social and professional networks to evidence
professional standing, and exhibits through social media the stockpiling of ‘friends’ and
‘followers’ together with self promotion through ‘selfies’ to ‘evidence’ the good life.
Each of these ‘substitutes’ for the real thing, that is, the thing that would fill the gap
experienced in the life of an individual, is formalised by Lacan as the objet petit a, the
little object a, where, in this case, the ‘a’ is the variable in a system of object production,
as in capitalist market economies. In that case, a president whether a Ceausecu in a
dictatorial framework or in a democratic system an Obama or a Trump is like the
cigarette just another objet petit a to be sold and consumed as the ‘real thing’. Hence, the
split subject ($) in its fantasies about what could complete it or return to some fantasied
pre-split wholeness is attracted to or desires objects (a) that promise the completion and
its experience of fulfilment accompanied by jouissance (that is, enjoyment of an
excessive kind, as in the thrill of experiencing the forbidden). In short hand, Lacan
proposed the formula $ ◊ a: the split subject ($) takes on a possible relationship (◊) to the
object (a) that causes the desire for fulfilment and its accompanying jouissance. It is the
Lacanian formula for the fundamental fantasy that sustains a person’s life. And it is
through this that some future desired utopia (or indeed dystopia) may be supported and
thus exploitable for economic, political or religious aims. That is, the utopia may be
thought of as like a body, a whole, whether the physical body of the individual or the
body of a national or global society that presents a picture of what the good life would be
if only the fragments or the repressed were brought together. A dystopia would function
inversely, perhaps zombie-like, as the jouissance gained from the ruin of the whole.
Each can be manipulated. Bernays, as the nephew of Freud, employed psychoanalytic
insights in his campaigns in order to, for example, connect cigarettes to the then
contemporary women’s campaigns for equality with men. For him at least there was the
obvious symbolic relation between the cigarette and the penis as part object that could be
combined with the phallic image of the torch of freedom and with the sensuousness of
oral pleasure. It worked: there was a significant rise in sales due to women overcoming
the cultural injunction against them smoking in public (Brandt 1996, Tye 1998). He
talked of this as the engineering of consent (1947).
Bernays was also influenced by Lippmann (1922) who wrote of the manufacture of
consent through the use of narratives to paint pictures in the minds of what he called the
phantom public (1927), that is, people who have to be ‘educated’ or rather schooled, to
believe they are thinking for themselves when they adopt the opinions of experts,
celebrities, and the opinion forming media. Teachers, lecturers, researcher thus have a
critical role to play – and not only that, but a critical decision to make when creating
learning environments, curricula and strategies for teaching: transmit the ‘pictures of the
world’ defined by policy; or, to critique that picture where necessary. The concept of the
phantom public can be seen as an ‘object’, a petit a, that fills a gap where an active
critically aware, debating, effective public ought to be. However, in Lippmann’s view an
active directly participative democracy is impossible. He argued that no single person
could hope to master the scientific, political, economic, sociological knowledge and skills
required to be fully informed on every policy decision to be made by governments. This,
he said, should be left to experts. In order to sustain the illusion of a democracy, then the
public’s consent to the decisions of the experts should be manufactured. Bernays (1928)
went a little further and wrote of an ‘invisible government’ of elites who pull the strings
behind the scenes. The relation between the phantom public and elites can be seen in the
function of the term ‘the will of the people’ as employed by post Brexit referendum May
government and their right wing media to avoid parliamentary discussion following the
brexit vote (see for example: Dominiczak, Swinford and Riley-Smith 2016). Yet, as an
agent ‘the will of the people is a phantom’ in the Lippmann sense of having been
‘manufactured’. Since, 48.1% of those who voted, voted against leaving the EU, the
51%.9% cannot be the will of all the people. The ‘will of the people’ thus hides the real
agents (the government as decision maker) who can try to use this endorsement to back
their own decisions without recourse to parliament as the locus of democratic decision
making in the UK. This was tested in the High Court and the Supreme Court in a case
brought by Gina Miller (2017) . The government had tried to bring into play the
relatively arcane statute of 1539 used by Henry VIII that ironically employs a royal
power of ‘royal prerogative’ over that of parliamentary democratic debate and decision.
In short, shuffled into the place where democracy ought to be, is a sovereign power that
has to be systematically challenged through the courts if it is not to take up residence.
This sovereign power employs what Lacan called the discourse of mastery that imposes a
single voice over that of the multiple voices of democracy. In this discourse, there is no
place for friendship and the enemy has to be subdued to become either servant, slave or
dead. The single voice excludes the voice of the other. In short, dissent is written out of
debate by recourse to the ‘will of the people’, a phantom object that replaces the
multiplicity of voices as a living dynamically changing democracy into a battle where
those defined as ‘us’ crush the enemies (Martinson 2017). A multiplicity of voices has to
recognise the other as legitimate, if not as a friend, if a democracy of debate and decision
making is to be realised and not reduced to mastery or tyranny by a few over the rest
(Mouffe 1993).
In Lacan’s discourses the signifying system of the master is written as S1, and read as
the master signifier. The master, of course, is not a person as such but an abstract system
of signifiers sustaining a symbolic order articulated in everyday practice discursively in
employee-employer, student-teacher, state-subject realtions. The individuals that occupy
positions of power are able to do so because of the dominant discourses that justify and
maintain prevailing forms of social, economic and political organisation. If there is to be
a democracy, in Claude Lefort’s (1988) view, there can be no dominant power or S1,
apart from the forms of democratic organisation that organise a debate among those
equally able to express their voice. Once a monarch or dictator has been removed, the
strategic task of democracy is to keep the place of power empty of monarchs and forms
of organisation that confer privilege to the few; just as it is the aim of those who want to
be masters, to occupy it and create forms of organisation that reinforce and amplify their
power over others. The freedoms of individuals depends on how the places of power in
society are organised and filled with meaningful content, that is, how words like freedom,
human rights, equality and democracy are defined and practiced by people. For Laclau
(2005) such words are empty signifiers capable of universalising whatever succeeds in
being marshalled into place. For example, ‘the will of the people’ acts initially as an
empty signifier. By marshalling the ‘will’ expressed by 51.9% of those citizens who
actually voted as the contents of the category ‘will of the people’, this then represses the
will of those who voted against and those who did not, or were not allowed to vote.
Similarly, Bernays’ ‘torches of freedom’ acted as an empty signifier which he deployed
in relation to an essentially harmful product inscribing it with the universalising signifier
of freedom as a universal good. To smoke in public was then to evidence being liberated;
just as to take decisions that signify the ‘will of the people’ is to evidence democracy in
practice and authorise governments in their policy making.
Whether it is the manufacture of consent or the production of a phantom public that
establishes the will of the people these stand as the objet a for those who want to occupy
the place of power. The challenge for leaders is to find the something that will fill the
feeling of ‘lack’, ‘absence’, ‘unfulfilment’ at the heart of people’s sense of being: for
example, Brexit or a Trump presidency that addresses the fears of ‘immigration’ taking
away jobs or corrupting the culture by promising action to stop the flows of unwanted
people. Such promises addressing the lack then place the objet petit a (to continue the
example, Trump or Brexit) in the place of agency to cause desire in the others, that is, the
ones whose fantasies and will are to be manipulated as a condition for leaders and their
political parties to occupy the place of power. If the fantasy that is shaped and produced
as the object of desire is to be effective it must speak a ‘truth’ of some sort, a ‘truth’ that
has been repressed (or perceived to have been repressed, as in the belief that there has
been an erosion of sovereignty that comes from allowing immigration to dilute a culture)
and must return triumphant through the expression of a fantasy that promises fulfilment
through action that addresses that truth. For the relationship between signifiers,
subjectivities, agency, objet petit a, the production of effects and truth, Lacan employs
two diagrams that need to be placed on top of each other to analyse the structure of a
given discourse. The first presents communication as a relationship between an agent
(speaker whether human or otherwise) and its other (recipient) as being complicated by
the placing of the ‘truth’ of what is being spoken as under cover, under the bar, repressed.
In this sense the agent can lie deliberately, misspeak under the influence of a
subconscious ‘truth’ that generates ‘freudian slips’, ambiguities, or puns which partly if
not fully, hint at a hidden truth. What is produced in terms of an interpretation, a textual
object, a practice depends for its proper interpretation upon what knowledge, insights, or
indeed what fantasies that the other accepts as being knowledge or as being ‘what
everybody knows’ (where knowledge or what counts as knowledge or ‘what everybody
knows’ in this sense takes the place of the master signifier and is written as S2). The
value (of agency etc) given to each place in this diagram does not change:

agency other

_______ ________

truth production

Diagram 1 The places

The contents ($, S1, S2, a) of the places however can change, as each ‘shuffle’ around
from place to place thus altering the social bond created between individuals. The
starting point for the Lacanian discourses is that of the Master, because in a strong
reading of the discourses, no matter whether they shuffle around to reduce the hold of the
master they always return to the master , maybe not the same master, maybe a more
benevolent master, but a master nonetheless (Zizek 1998, 2013). In contemporary terms,
one might think of particular characters such as Bythe Masters – appropriately named! -
who created the algorithms used for financial speculation that led to the 2008 financial
crisis (Teather 2008). She like others take up residence in the place of the master,
donning ‘his’ allure, becoming just one of the financial ‘masters of the universe’
(Stedman 2012) or as Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive at Goldman Sachs put it regarding
himself, he is “just a banker doing God’s work” (Moore 2010). However, it is not such
individuals - whether technology ‘giants’ or the super rich oligarchs (Freeland 2012) -
who are currently in the place of power, able to manipulate markets and politics that
needs to be addressed if change is to take place. They are in a sense the by-products of
pre-existing discourses and organisations of cultural and physical resources. Thus rather
than starting with the individuals, what is more important is how the systems of laws,
forms of organisation, technologies, discourses and practices can be combined and
manipulated to favour individuals, groups, classes, organisations. It is the issue of how
people come to do the work of the ‘masters’ in voluntary servitude as La Boetie called it
rather than subverting them that needs to be addressed both politically and educationally
if democracy is to be more than a symbolic practice. It is through a combination of
discourses, knowledge, forms of organisation, tools and any other useful product of
culture that Agamben (2009), drawing on Foucault, described as a dispositif (loosely
translated as apparatus) that works upon the subjectivity of individuals. Tackling this
issue is first of all educational if education is understood to mean a critical perspective on
the relation between subjects and their world and how this is discursively constructed. In
this sense, it is whether education explores the strategic role of discourses in framing the
production and deployment of dispositifs to address particular objectives or issues that is
critical (c.f. Schostak and Schostak 2012). In that sense the master is not so much an
individual but a position in a formal or symbolic order that can be occupied by
individuals regardless of gender and is thus educationally open to critique. It is, however,
not a critique that merely replaces one master by another as advocated by Zizek (2013)
who, wanting an alternative to right wing politics, sees no alternative but to call for a
‘Thatcher of the left’. That is to say, in the choice between right and left the reality of the
social bond created by discourse maintains its essential structure as a hierarchy between
the leading and the led or the left alone. For Zizek, as for Lacan, there is always the
return to the discourse of the master. This structure forecloses the possibility of a society
of equals and thus of democracy as will now be explored in terms of the four Lacanian
discourses that are set out in the second set of diagrams, the elements of which shuffle
around the places described in diagram 1.

(Re)reading the Four Discourses as the Foreclosure of Democracy

Hence to begin. As the perpetual point of return, the discourse of the master is
fundamentally inegalitarian and anti-democratic. It is subversive of all attempts towards
equality of voice, decision making and action. None other than the one able to represent
or take the place of the master (S1) is in charge of the place of power (or the place that
enables the expression and organisation of powers) and thus occupies the place of agency
in the first of the discourses. Politically, how an individual succeeds in occupying the
place of the master ranges from, for example, engaging in elections to revolutions or a
violent coup d’état. Once achieved, in the context of the discourse of the master, all
other forms of social organisation whether places of employment in the market, schools,
or other forms of social service in the voluntary and public sectors are drawn into the
service of those who occupy the positions of control or agency. In each case there are
prior forms of organisation, laws, technologies and knowledge that enable occupation of
the place of the master to be undertaken. For the survival of a regime what matters in
each case is how the mastery is exercised. Even a dictatorship can provide sufficient
security, stability and material satisfaction for a sufficient number of the people to live
their lives trouble free and some argue it is preferable to an instable democracy or even as
appropriate to countries in need of development (cf., Olsen 1993, Burnell 2010); or
indeed, that its pervasiveness across organisations is accounted for by its link to survival
advantages (Pfeffer 2013). In a sense, no single individual who embodies, for the time
being, the status of the master has control over the discourse of the master. To that
extent, even where there is a powerful leader, no one permanently embodies the master.
In this use of discourse, it is discourse itself that creates the subject positions and the
places occupied by subjects. Discourse, in this view, exists intersubjectively and
intertextually and thus is independent of any given individual – in that sense it is a work
of multitudes both external to any individual, yet intimately experienced when speaking
and when receiving – in Lacan’s terms an extimate experience, a neologism composed of
both ‘intimate’ and ‘external’.
In the Lacanian discourse of the master, the direction of communication (—>) is from
the one in the place of agency towards the one in the place of the other. The other as
servant to the master is called upon to deploy their knowledge (S2) to satisfy the
demand(s) of the master. However, as this knowledge cannot represent everything, there
is always a remainder (a). The truth is, however, that the master is split in ‘his’ being and
thus needs the knowledge of the other to create the objects that provide a sense of
completeness. To the extent that the servant is able to satisfy the master then new
knowledge is created which in turn gives the servant a bit of pleasure or jouissance which
is itself extraneous to the knowledge as object (a). There is no direct access by the
master to the repressed truth of being a split subject ($); furthermore, there is no direct
relation (//) between this truth of what is wanted and what is produced to satisfy that want
by the other as servant. There can only be interpretation and the lack experienced by the
master can never be overcome. Thus the master is always demanding a new product that
promises to be the objet a (gold, yachts, drugs, ….) capable of providing final,
everlasting fulfilment. These ultimately impossible to satisfy relationships are mapped as
follows as the discourse of the master:

S1 ————————> S2
__ __
$ // a
Diagram 2 Discourse of the Master

That is to say, reading the bottom line of diagram 2, there is a repressed fundamental
fantasy ($ ◊ a) that cannot be directly communicated from master to servant which in
itself provides a never ending development of knowledge to try to bridge the gap and
realise the fantasy of final completion. The discourse of the master is always greater than
the capacity of the one who ‘wants to be master’ to incarnate it, since it must include the
discourses of the servants who produce knowledge and become experts. The other’s
knowledge and capacity to produce, thus, itself becomes a source of mastery that can be
used, either to service or subvert, control and indeed overthrow the master. This might
suggest a possible breakthrough for a democracy of educated voices in the place of power
– it would be the hope of educationists such as Dewey . Thus the pattern of the
discourse that is produced changes as soon as knowledge (S2 ) occupies the place of
power:

S2 ————————> a
__ __
S1 // $
Diagram 3 Discourse of the University

Lacan called this the discourse of the university. More generally it refers to the role of
expert knowledge in the organisation and management of social relationships. However,
to be noticed is that in this discourse, the master occupies the place of truth when
knowledge is in agency. In that sense, the discourse of the university hides the truth that
it is still in service to the master. In accepting being managed by knowledge, each new
aspect of knowledge to be learnt is, for the good pupil, the good research scientist, a
cause of desire (a). However, by privileging the disciplines of knowledge the student,
citizen or employee accepts what Lacan, following Freud, called the castrating effects of
the symbolic order, that is, the social order of knowledge, law and duty. That is to say,
the individual is curtailed by law, by custom, by knowledge from doing and saying
whatever they want on pain of punishment, exclusion, indeed, death. It is revealed in the
most mundane of statements from “when you father/mother hears you’ve done x,
then….” to “do as you’re told” and “work hard and save for the future”. Immediate
enjoyment is to be postponed either to avoid punishment or for some promised future
enjoyment. The individual who accepts this becomes thus an alienated product ($) of
knowledge, law, duty. The rewards may be high for those who do accept and succeed in,
for example, the knowledge society or as a secure member of the managerialised systems
of corporations. However, in Spinozan terms there is no democracy of powers since
‘reason’, or at least what passes as reason in bureaucracies under the discipline of the
(repressed) master, is privileged above other bodily powers. Therefore, expertise as
defined under mastery, aborts democracy, and indeed education in its sense as a critical,
challenging, creative perspective on the world, rendering both a phantom. Rather than
democratic decision making, managers‘lay down the law’, take hard decisions about pay,
redundancy and staff discipline. In that sense they embody the discourse of the master
whether or not they enthusiastically adopt the role of the ‘macho manager’, or indeed,
headteacher. The role of rational knowledge in this discourse is to discipline the body to
perform and to achieve rationally determined goals. Dejours (1998, 2003; Dejours and
Deranty 2010; Deranty 2008) as a practicing clinical psychoanalyst has critically
examined the relationship between capitalist forms of rationally constructed performance
related work and mental illness. Contrary to Arendt (1998) he sees work in its fullest
sense as the expression of all the powers of the human being. Work as the organisation
of knowledge, resources and skills presupposes labour (in Arendt’s terms reduced to only
satisfying biological needs) as well as creating the conditions for political organisation
when workers address the best way of deploying the different skills and knowledge of
people in the accomplishment of a project. Where Arendt saw labour, work (to create a
human environment) and action (to realise an agreed vision of the ‘good society) as
distinct and hierarchical in relation, Dejours sees them as organic and premised on
egalitarian relations between people. The subject in each kind of work discourse is
different. In Dejours' view the subject under capitalism with its managerialist practices is
split and thus alienated from the totality of work conceived as a collectively organised
and agreed project. Rather than being a worker in its fullest sense, under capitalism the
individual is simply an employee contracted to fulfil specified activities in specified
ways. Moreover, Dejours argues that in the interests of cost cutting, deadlines, and
measurable objectives to be met, too often short cuts have to be made if deadlines are to
be met, for example using cheaper materials, or inferior tools. Dejours writes that to do
the job properly workers may have to break the rules in order to add essential but
immeasurable aspects of the job and make up for inferior materials, under staffing and
lack of resources. This, he says is cited by his clients as leading to stress, nervous
breakdowns and attempted suicides. The scale of these potential problems is suggested in
a recent report by the Institute of Directors indicating that over half of workplaces in the
UK have a problem with mental health issues (Silvester 2017). Schools are no exception
with recent reports of exam stress leading to self harm (Stone 2015) and the suicide
attempts of primary school children (Espinoza 2016).
The work of learning has long been split from ideas of education as a holistic human
activity undertaken in the pursuit of self defining projects. When Robert Lowe (Brock
1978) campaigned to ‘educate our masters’ before the 1870 Education Act, it was not so
that they would become equivalent to those privately educated as leaders but to know
their place and defer to the decisions of their betters. Since that time, it may be argued,
education has changed under democratic pressure to promote social justice and social
mobility. However, Marsh (2011) and Blacker (2013) join a long tradition of
sociological research that argues schools, colleges and indeed universities do little if
anything to challenge and bring change. Rather their role is to internalise in young minds
and inscribe in their practices and on their bodies the prevailing symbolic order, indeed,
eagerly deploying contemporary technologies to reinforce compliance (cf. Schostak
2014). It is not so much that schools cannot compensate for society but that schools
themselves have an essential role in the construction and maintenance of the problem.
Challenge, if not easy, does come, in many guises. As Waller (1932) pointed out long
ago, there is a ‘natural’ or structural antagonism, indeed hostility between teachers and
pupils where the one tries to get the other to do what they do not want to do. In terms of
social class underlying conflicts can be read in terms of the different interests of each
class that can lead as Simon (1960) put it, to the emergence of ‘two nations’, each having
their different forms of schooling, life styles and employment opportunities. Certainly
contemporary economic and sociological research shows the persistently widening gap
between the very rich and the rest (Picketty 2014, Sayer 2015) and the impacts of
inequality on health (WHO Report 2008). There have been many challenges to such
failures of mainstream economic theory (Quiggin 2010, Keen 2011, Bowman et al 2014).
In particular the teaching of economics at universities, as Earl et al (2017) argue, has
been dominated by mathematical modelling that has little or no real reference to
economic and social realities. Indeed, policies of austerity leading to precarity have been
pursued globally regardless of suffering (Varoufakis 2015) and regardless of resistance to
and protests against suffering. Moreover, riots (Flett 2015), protests (Clement 2016)
and ‘hooliganism (Pearson1983) have a long history and can be read as symptoms of
suffering, anger, frustration (Winlow et al 2015). For some there is a perpetual hope, in
fact, a continual reading of the signs where challenges, rebellions and protests are seen to
be ‘kicking off all over’ (Mason 2013) that will, perhaps, finally kick the table over so
that a redistribution of powers, resources and rewards can take place that are more
democratic. However, although it can be argued that such responses do influence change
in the long run (Hadden 2014, Williams 2017), the mainstream response is typically to
regard them as unreasonable or hysterical or as meaningless. For example, confronted
with the views of Camille Rivera a member of the Occupy Movement the economist
Charlie Wolf accused her of speaking nonsense and that if she were to question
mainstream economics in his class he would kick her out (Schostak and Schostak 2012:
96). Wolf regarded her questions as, effectively, the discourse of the hysteric, as Lacan
called it. This discourse, diagram 4, challenges the master as the collective name for
those who manage, police and regulate the world. This questioning in being spoken (or
shouted) publicly occupies - in the sense of the occupy movement - the place of agency.
Through questioning why things have to be this way rather than some other way, the lack
experienced by the speaking subject ($) is privileged in addressing the master (S1) as
shown in diagram 4.

$ ————————> S1
__ __
a // S2
Diagram 4 Discourse of the Hysteric

Indeed, the $ could be called the hysterical subject, the one who is certain of nothing and
moreover questions the master’s certainty and the knowledge that supports that certainty.
Thus for example:

When protestors gathered outside the Vancouver Art Gallery to declaim against
provincial cutbacks to the arts (as I and a thousand others did in early September
2009) or to protest the 2010 Olympic games or when American right wingers
packed town halls in the summer of 2009 to protest against health care reform,
they/we/I were engaged in the discourse of the hysteric. We were addressing the
master, the master signifier, S1 - the provincial premier, the 10C, Obama. But the
hysteric’s discourse also produces knowledge, S2 a knowledge that is prized more
here than in any other discourse, a knowledge that is also a matter of loss, from the
oral histories that emerge from such ephemeral, political moments to the role of
historical hysterics like Freud’s Dora, or Anna O, whose symptoms “produced”
psychoanalysis. And what is also disavowed by the hysteric, it should be noted -
and this is key - is the pleasure that he or she takes in their stance - the a below the
barred subject. Protestors enjoy being protestors, right wingers enjoy having a
liberal president, activists enjoy their activism.
(Burnham 2010: 97)

There is something educational about the voice in the Lacanian discourse of the hysteric.
However, it is not a relation of friendship that enables this listening and is the object of
this listening. In listening to the questions, the lack of knowledge can be recognised and
attempts to address that lack undertaken by producing knowledge (S2) but it is a listening
and a knowledge that keeps its distance, clinically turns its back on familiarity and
friendship. There is, moreover, no incentive to stop challenging since the gap or absence
of a friendship is maintained and every challenge in itself generates some enjoyment, or
jouissance (a) whilst maintaining the gap, thus generating the incentive to keep
challenging. This creative or productive characteristic is quite distinct from the coercive
submissive characteristic of the discourse of the university. It could be said that, as
Lacan suggested, the discourse of the hysteric is more akin to the attitude and practice of
researchers and critical scholars who seek to innovate, discover and create. However,
although it can be argued that psychoanalysis is a co-production there is also the
necessary step to go beyond the questioning in the process of creating. Protest is not
enough (Roberts and Schostak 2012) particularly if the protesters’ demand is that it is the
other rather than the protestor, who is to do the work of reconstruction. The question at
this point is whether the protestor is waiting for a new master, one who is more
accommodating to the demands of the protestor; or, whether the protestor is hooked on
the jouissance, the bit of enjoyment that is gained from the act of protesting, questioning,
doubting. It is this question concerning the role of questioning when it is interpreted or
meant as subversive, disruptive, challenging of the status quo that is central to the
situation. If the labelling, the disruption/protest and the roles of those employed to
manage it or change it are the source of each individuals’ ‘jouissance’ why would
anything change? The questioning, its response when accompanied by jouissance
becomes the symptom of a state of affairs that can find no common resolution or creative
alternative.
That is why there is a further shuffling of positions in order to move to the discourse
of the analyst, the one who allows the space for the subject to go beyond questioning,
beyond protest, beyond the symptom, beyond the consumption of ‘objects’ that provide
jouissance as a replacement for the ‘real’ object, the missing ‘thing’ or the yearning for
some hazy completion located in the past as a nostalgia. Speaking out against some
oppression is important, but so is listening and producing within one’s self a new
knowledge that can write alternative futures for oneself in a co-operative rather than
competitive relation to others. As a mediator, a vanishing mediator perhaps, the role of
the one who listens, not to impose, but to promote a reading through which an alternative
future may be composed, is critical. This has a structural similarity to some forms of
radical democratic education that are not founded upon the expert knowledge of the
teacher as a knowledge of mastery, or as a discipline. What is it that the student or
patient find in themselves in relation to the one who listens? What is it that the teacher,
through listening may facilitate, or ‘draw out’ as a form of education?
In Lacan’s terms, such listening is the role of the analyst who occupies the place of
agency as an object, the object cause of desire (a). However, in the place of the clinic
(rather than the place of education) what fills the empty space of listening are the
suppressed master discourses S1 that do not have direct access to the knowledge S2 that
occupy the place of truth that the analyst is supposed to have regarding the patient’s
problems. In the educational case of the student, the democracy of the citizen or the fuller
notion of work the role of listening can facilitate their own reflection upon their demands
for leadership, as well as their need for answers to be provided by the teachers, the
politicians, the managers, the ‘experts’. To initiate this reflection the analyst or expert
suspends their supposed power to explain and only listens (in the place of agency,
becoming object petit a). As there is then nothing else to fill the silence, the empty space
of listening is filled with the anxieties, lacks and splits experienced by the client as split
subject ($):

a ————————> $
__ __
S2 // S1
Diagram 5 Discourse of the Analyst

There is a chance here, a hope perhaps, that the patient, the student, the employee will
find their own voice to move beyond the splits and anxieties in order to create new ways
of being. However, it is equally possible that these symptoms of the split subject can be
used by the unscrupulous to formulate knowledge to manipulate the other. When the
objet petit a as cause of desire occupies the place of power, of agency, what is being seen
or experienced is not what is being perceived in itself, but what the client projects based
on the repressed master discourses that inscribe his or her life. That is, it relates to the
other’s fantasy, the construct defined by master signifiers that cover over or provide
objects whose role is to fill in the lack that is experienced in the split or divided subject.
What the client potentially is able to learn is how they are inscribed by the master
discourses and then perhaps move beyond them in ways that enable them to live more
freely. However, for the unscrupulous there is the opportunity for reinforcing fantasies.
If, for example, Trump or the campaign leaders of Brexit occupy the position of agency
as objet petit a, then to attract their followers they must listen to and reinforce the desired
fantasy objects. .
While the analyst seeks to undo the fantasy that masks the splits and fears in order to
effect a ‘cure’, the populist, charismatic or indeed demagogic politician seeks to affirm
the fantasies as knowledge (S2) by claiming these fantasies speak a truth. The implication
is, as Zizek during an interview admits, that the position of the analyst comes close to that
of the perverse:

In The Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan defines the final, concluding moment of
analysis as the one when you step out, when you don’t have desire any more, in this
sense. You become the being of the drive; you pass from the side of the divided
subject to the side of the object. Which is why the analyst is an object in this sense.
I also agree with you if your point is that this is in a way extremely close, almost
imperceptibly close, to the perverse position. Although the gap is there–absolute
but almost imperceptible.
(Canning 1993)

The ‘almost imperceptible’ provides the perverse with its opportunity. Lacan’s discourse
of the perverse takes place when “the object that speaks positions itself as an instrument
in behalf of the other, an instrument grounded in knowledge of what is best for the
subject or other” (Dean 2009: 80). The teacher ‘as an instrument in behalf of the other’
may well argue that what he or she is doing is, indeed, ‘in the best interests’ of the
student. In terms of policy demands and discipline, this ‘in the best interests’ overrides
what the student perceives as in his or her own best interests. In that sense, in that
imperceptibly close sense, it perverts the emergence of self motivated and self defined
interests of the student that could provide alternative courses of reflection and knowledge
production. Rather than the student, as other to the teacher, adopting a role of equality
with the teacher in shaping his or her own educational courses of action, the student can
be considered as a something that is yet to be. In that sense, the other does not yet fully
exist. This status of being in a process open to definition, of the other provides the
openings for the pervert in Lacan’s sense, as well as the analyst/teacher.
Although individuals occupying the place of the pervert may be male or female, it is
the case that Lacan consistently saw the discourse of the pervert as masculine (Swales
2012). Hence, in the descriptions that follow, the masculine case is typically employed.
Through the instrumentality of the pervert: “ the Other must be made to exist. The
perverse fundamental fantasy, then, reflects the pervert’s commitment to making the
Other exist by plugging up the lack in the Other” (Swales 2012: 91-2). In short, there is a
will to make the other exist, however “This will is not that of the pervert but instead is his
interpretation of the Other’s will” (Swales 2012: 92). The ‘Other’ – or, ‘big Other’ - is
often employed to refer to the symbolic order underpinned by the master signifier: that is
the order of law, custom, knowledge, intersubjective relations, and the forms of language.
A given individual, through processes of socialisation and schooling can be drawn to take
up their place within this order as student, worker, parent and so on. In that sense, the
student as one who is an ‘other’ who has yet to take their place in the symbolic order is
vulnerable to or open to definitions of what this place could be. In this status of ‘yet to
be’ is the ‘lack’ of a satisfying definition. This lack motivates a ‘will-to-definition’, or
more broadly a ‘will-to-jouissance’. Thus:

the pervert puts himself in the position of object a so that he can approach his
partner on behalf of the Other’s will-to-jouissance. The effect of his approach is
that he reveals the lack in his partner (as a lack in jouissance), such that his
 partner’s identity as a split subject ($) is obvious. The pervert brings out and then
plugs up the lack in the other.
(Swales 2012: 92)

For example, the politician - say Theresa May as discussed earlier - in the place of power
by assuming the role of being the instrument of the ‘will of the people’, is acting
perversely. As agent of the will of the people, the legitimacy of any laws, evidence or
norms that counter this fantasied ‘will of the people’ are to be denied since the pervert
knows what is in the best interests of the other. The right wing press following the
referendum to leave the EU presented themselves as the “Champions of the People”
(Daily Mail Comment 2016) against those who are “THWARTING the will of the
people” (Millar 2017). That 48.1% voted against is irrelevant in calling on the ‘will of
the people’, a will that is made to exist regardless of the complexity of the issues,
debates, fears, hopes of the population. The truth - that is the truth of the will of the
people - is made-to-be, regardless of evidence. A similar argument can, of course, be
made for the teacher in the place of the parent, in loco parentis, who knows what is best
for the children in his or her care. This knowledge of ‘what is best’ appeals to what is
counted as the common knowledge, beliefs and values of a given community or imagined
society through which individuals perceive themselves as sharing an identity, say through
Britishness, to others they have never met (Anderson 1983). Alongside the teaching of
subject knowledge is the teaching of these ‘common senses’ of value, beliefs and forms
of behaviour as well as imaginary identifications that comprise what Jackson (1968) first
called the ‘hidden curriculum’ of a given community or society. The hidden curriculum,
as employed here, refers then to the ways in which people are taught to accept the truths
of their cultural and social heritage and identify and adopt their particular place in the
symbolic order of the community or society within which they live. Is the place to be
adopted and the truths to be accepted ones that are promoted by the teacher as the analyst
or as the perverse? More broadly, the hidden curriculum of the classroom prepares for
the forms of schooling that take place outside of school in terms of what may be called
public pedagogy (Sandlin et al 2011). This public pedagogy may either adopt a critical
emancipatory practice drawing on the work of Freire (1972) where individuals become
subjects through their own agency or be more akin to Lippmann’s manufacture of
consent where individuals become subjects of the agency of ‘experts’ acting behalf of
elites. It is in this latter that the role of the perverse slips into the ‘almost imperceptible’
gap opened by the analyst who may either create the conditions for critical reflection on
experience or act to manipulate the desires of the public for the benefit of elites. There
are two kinds of intention operating here: the operations of analysis that seek to uncover
the true relations between the individual and the organising powers of the state and
society in order to enable decision making that enable individuals to act according to their
needs and interests; and the forms of analysis that reveal how the beliefs, values,
knowledge, and interests of the public can be manipulated to create a sense of the ‘truth’
that can be used to meet the interests and needs of elites.
This made-to-be truth resembles what Stephen Colbert, in his American TV show The
Colbert Report, called ‘truthiness’ to refer to evidence claims or statements that feel right
regardless of evidence (Zimmer 2010). During the presidential campaign of Trump,
Colbert revisited truthiness and moved it a stage further in terms of Trumpiness:
“Truthiness has to feel true, but Trumpiness doesn't even have to do that," so that "In fact,
many Trump supporters don't believe his wildest promises, and they don't care” (Weber
2016). All that then matters is the enjoyment coming from making judgements and
statements regardless of truth. Trump - or rather his ghost writer - called it “truthful
hyperbole” where “I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big
themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little
hyperbole never hurts” (Trump 1987: 58). The campaign and the early days of the
presidency have been characterised by what has more prosaically been called post-truth, a
condition where truth no longer matters and conspiracy theories and ‘alternative facts’ are
deployed to support a desired fantasy or policy (Swaine 2017).
The more earthy term, for such Trumpiness or truthful hyperbole is bullshit. Frankfurt
(2005: 56) distinguishes truth, lying and bullshit:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth.

Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby
responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest
man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is
correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the
bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor
on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest
man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in
getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says
describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his
purpose.

The use of male pronouns here of course does not mean that only men lie and bullshit
cannot also be cowshit. Thus, given Lacan’s concern to generalise the structure of his
discourses beyond specific cases by using abstract formulae that can be applied
regardless of gender or specific cultural context, this means that a particular individual
with a perverse structure who occupies the place of power does not have to be male.
Nevertheless, the names employed for Lacan’s discourses and many of his key
psychoanalytic terms, betray a legacy that cannot be ignored if ways are to be found to
challenge, overcome, transform present circumstances and rewrite our collective futures.
If the master discourse legacies of sexism, racism, elitism, competition and domination
are to be tackled then the discourses of the perverse that sustain their return to the place
of power in contemporary politics, capitalism and education cannot be ignored. The rise
in racist hate crimes following Brexit (Meier 2017) and accompanying Trump’s election
(Mathias 2017), the rise of extreme right views and white supremacism (Mason 2016)
attest to the jouissance of the return of the repressed that is the ‘truth’ revealed through
his ‘truthful hyperbole’. Through it he promises to provide his followers what is lacking,
in the way that capitalism advertises its products, with enjoyment “right here, right now”
Verhaeghe (2011: 132). In Lacan’s discussions of capitalism, although it is proclaimed
to work well for so many, it does in fact not provide enjoyment, but is structured to
maintain a lack of enjoyment (Declercq 2006). Thus as each object, or each panacea
offered by a succession of masters, fails to provide lasting enjoyment, capitalism and its
politics seeks to produce a new fantasy object, a new master proclaiming the ‘hyperbolic
truth’ of being able to deliver the ‘real thing’. Now a similar logic, it can be argued, can
be applied to democracy.
In his ‘leftist tribute to Thatcher’, Zizek (2013) wrote that there is a defect at the heart
of democracy, ‘the impossible ideal of the “omni-competent citizen”’. It is what keeps
the ‘citizen’ as the consumer of leaders-to-follow coming back for more. And following
Badiou, Zizek suggests the need for people to be woken by a new master ‘who would
repeat Thatcher’s gesture in the opposite direction, transforming the entire field of
presuppositions shared by today’s political elite of all main orientations.’ For Zizek, the
‘real thing’ to be delivered is thus the Thatcher of the Left. However, it was not a left
Thatcher that came along but rather a Thatcher mark 2 in the guise of Theresa May, and
in the US, Trump. Not to be downcast, albeit horrified by Trump, Zizek proclaimed he
backed him because ‘It will be a kind of big awakening. New political processes will be
set in motion’ (Hajda 2016). Similarly on the left in the UK, many hoped that Brexit
would usher in the new radical left. However, in perversely waiting for these and
presumably yet other new leaders along with a hoped for real thing of the left, democracy
is foreclosed. How then can the role of education in ‘awakening’ be thought and
practiced, big or otherwise, to contribute to the development of individuals effective in
the ways of critique and decision making?

Education for Futures Without Leaders, Without Conclusions

If the task facing the building of democracy is the development of ‘the impossible ideal
of the “omni-competent citizen”’, then the conclusion in Lippmann’s terms is that there is
nothing other than a phantom public whose consent is always to be manufactured by
experts. For Zizek (2013) following the logic of Lippmann combined with Badiou:

The master is the one who helps the individual to become a subject. That is to say,
if one admits that the subject emerges in the tension between the individual and the
universality, then it is obvious that the individual needs a mediation, and thereby an
authority, in order to progress on this path. One has to renew the position of the
master - it is not true that one can do without it, even especially in the perspective
of emancipation.

There is a lot to admit if masters are necessary. The political action of the individual is
thus to wait for someone to awaken them and make them into a subject. It is not hard to
reread the above, replacing master with teacher, and phantom public, with phantom
student. However, one can write a different kind of conclusion if the circularity of the
discourses is undermined. In the logic of work explored by Dejours (1998), or the logic
of the ‘society of equals’ (Rosanvallon 2013) or indeed, the logic of Spinoza’s democracy
of powers there is the other as co-equal, as co-producer, as co-dependent able to combine
in relationships to aggregate their powers for mutual projects. In the words of Bakunin,
echoing Spinoza and those advocating the society of equals in the revolutionary decades
of the 18th and 19th centuries described by Rosanvallon: “I am truly free only when all
human beings, men and women, are equally free” (Bakunin 1871: 237). This is an
alternative logic to that of the Lacanian master discourses that are predicated upon
inequalities established through competitive struggles. It may be described as anarchist
in its etymological sense of ‘without a leader’; and may equally be described as co-
operative in the sense of recognising the dependency of each on each other for their
freedoms. Indeed, the principles of equality and freedom are central to the radical
democratic theories of, for example, Laclau (2005), Mouffe (2005) to underpin how
differences between people can be addressed without one person or group imposing upon
others. This issue is different to that of the role of the expert in manufacturing consent.
It concerns the quality of the knowledge, values and practice – or collective intelligence,
in this wider sense of the word – that can be brought to bear upon making decisions of
mutual benefit. For this to happen, then social forms of organisation need to be
reconceptualised. For example, while Dewey agreed fully with Lippmann’s analysis of
the problems of democracy, he saw that democracy was not first and foremost political
but social. In terms of radical democracy, then, this shifts the tension from that between
leader and led, to a tension between equals who necessarily regard each other from
different standpoints and work for mutual benefit. To engage with each other they must
draw upon their powers to think, imagine, critique and create. This creates then the
necessary tension for an individual to become a subject in mutual, fundamentally social
engagement with others. Masters are thus not necessary in the sense argued by Zizek,
Badiou and Lippmann. And nor, therefore, are teachers, that is, those teachers who
define their role as masters, leaders, gurus. This is not to say that no role exists for
teaching. Rather, the role may be more fluid as in the case of the School of Barbiana
(1969) or Kohl’s (1971) 36 Children or Richmond’s (1982) Becoming Our Own Experts
where each member can contribute their knowledge when needed or when working
together on mutual projects of research. Such approaches have typically been small scale
and marginal creating their own small spaces inside an often hostile system, or like
Summerhill (Neill 1973) outside of the system. However, Stenhouse’s (1975) Humanities
Curriculum Project sought to change the way curriculum was conceived from being an
object to be taught to being a process. Fundamental to it was the idea of the ‘neutral
chair’ as a means to debate controversial issues. Here the teacher suspended his or her
judgement but maintained the conditions of rational debate. The focus was to be on
evidence supporting or challenging alternative viewpoints during debate. The centrality
of reason and of evidence in debate is significant in the post-truth context of ‘false news’,
‘truthiness’ and its discourses of the perverse.
There are then, two alternative logics that a given teacher might endorse. To adopt one
undermines the other. The pressure to adopt traditionally defined leadership roles that
place teachers into the position of managing performance according to key indicators,
disciplining, transmitting information and testing undermines social forms of organisation
that privilege the equality of voice and decision making. The logic of equality is not a
logic of emancipation from a master, but a logic of co-operative work in order to create
social futures without masters. Rather than the mediation of some Thatcher of the left, a
logic of equality offers the strategy of the systematic development of constraints to the
emergence of mastery and its encircling discourses. The problem of waiting for the good
leader, the mediator who will vanish once the ‘good’ has been achieved, is that as
Machiavelli knew well, masters love power and hang onto it with all their strength
(McCormick 2011).
For equality to occupy the place of power, it must build against mastery, recognising
the work of all the discourses of mastery and their perversion of democracy in all forms
of social organisation from the intimacies of home to the alienations of work and the
seductions of the leader. In curriculum terms, this provides a Stenhouse-like opportunity
to focus on the processes of being alert to the voice of the master in everyday situations
involves working through the shifting patterns of discourse employed in each concrete
interaction to coerce, discipline, seduce, exploit anxiety or panic. It is like the role of the
analyst to the extent that the role of master is suspended and the role of listening
promoted to enable the focus on the curiosities, values, beliefs, taken-for-granted
knowledge, understandings, desires of the other.
The organisation of schools is itself a hidden curriculum of the relations between
people. Who is speaking ‘in the best interests of another’? How is authority exercised?
What is the basis for any evidence that is employed? And how are ‘subjects’ chosen and
their exploration undertaken? Hence if the idea is to develop education that is consistent
with a radical democratic philosophy or in broad terms a society of equals then do the
mechanisms, procedures and practices within an organisation ensure discourses enable
the equality or do they suspend the exercise of voice in curricular decision making and
school governance? As Alexander Bloom, head teacher of a democratically oriented
secondary school between 1945 and 1955, put it “It will seem that we, as teachers, have
very little power. Nor do we need it. We are, by the nature of our work, in authority. Our
School Council prevents us from being authoritarian” (in Fielding 2005). This suggests it
is useful to distinguish between kinds of authority. Weber saw three kinds of ‘legitimate’
authority: legal-rational, traditional and charismatic. Each, however potentially reduce to
the logic of the master discourses in that the legal-rational and the traditional combine
into Lacan’s symbolic order imposing restrictions upon the individual. And the
charismatic may dominate and supress less charismatic speakers. This is particularly
problematic if the less charismatic have the better evidence to support their views.
Bloom’s approach however suggests a move towards the role of the council, elected by a
public as the legitimating source. The school council provided a means by which to
suspend the discourses of mastery inherent in authoritarianism. However, there are
further radical moves to make in order to dissolve the kinds of relations that create the
continual shuffling involved in the discourses of the master. Rather than individuals
occupying a permanent role of ‘authority over others’ as typically in the case of
mainstream schooling or in line managed organisations of any kind, more co-operative,
egalitarian relations can be constructed in the pursuit of mutual education in schools and
more broadly as a form of politics “as mutual education: of the political domain as a
public realm, where members of a political community listen to, argue with and persuade
each other as equal citizens, so as to find solutions to their common problems”
(Marquand 1988: 231). Where the roles, mechanisms, procedures and practices in
organisations are constructed to ensure equality of decision making any attempt to return
to the perverse discourses of the master can be defused, constrained or deconstructed.
The political question then is how to assert equality without falling into the Lacanian
discourse of the hysteric. Rather than simply questioning rebelling or protesting and
waiting for the ‘Thatcher of the Left’, the assertion of equality produces discourses that –
as in Balibar’s égaliberté – place into agency subjects who strive to include the
development of all because, as Spinoza argued, the greatest benefit comes from
developing the potential of all. Rather than a split subject ($) alienated from others, the
subject is characterised as ‘in process’, that is, being open to potentials. This in part
picks up on Kristeva’s (1984) notion of the ‘sujet en procès’, that is the jury-like process
of ‘attacking’ and de-constructing static, unitary identities but emphasises more the
creativity involved in being open to potential and being faithful to difference and
disagreement (Rancière 1999). Where the master discourse closes down disagreement
and shapes the potentials of others to deliver only what the master (whether as embodied
for example by a state leader, a corporate CEO, a headteacher or a parent) demands, the
discourses of equality depend upon openness to others as necessary to the exploration of
potential and the creation of new cultural forms, practices and ways of organising
everyday life to provide mutual benefit. There are legacies of debates, practices and
forms of organisation that can be critically explored and revived to inform current
thinking and action (Fielding and Moss 2011, Rudd and Goodson 2017, Woodin 2014).
If people are to be free then their voices must count equally in the organisation of
everyday life from schools to work to family and leisure. The discourses of the master
pervert democracy by imposing relations of inequality by for example employing the
laws, the machineries through which laws are created and imposed, and the hierarchical
organisational structures that maintain discipline. The search for knowledge here is
undertaken to reinforce disciplinary power.
In a relation of equality, logically the mutual enjoyment underlying the search for
knowledge is more related to friendship in a relation of mutual acceptance based on
mutual listening as in the discourse of the analyst. However, the step beyond the silence
of the analyst, and mutual listening is the necessity of critical debate to address personal
and social issues. No longer asking for ‘the impossible ideal of the “omni-competent
citizen”’ (Zizek 2013), people can turn to the consequences of the acts of the master in
their lives locally lived and occupy the local places of power to write their futures beyond
that of the master in order to produce a society of equals. Thus rather than omni-
comnpetence, the turn is towards the ‘ignorant master’ (Rancière 1987); that is, given no
one has mastery of everything, the recognition that all are ignorant in something can play
a positive role in promoting mutually enriching projects of inquiry to address issues of
‘truth’, ‘subjectivity’ and developing one’s powers in free and equal association with
others. All depend on each other to overcome or deal with acknowledged ignorance. It is
this mutual dependency born from a recognition of ignorance that creates the conditions
for educational debates and social explorations and experimentations. Legacies from the
history of democratic education, as Fielding and Moss (2011) argue provide models for
prefiguring the future of democratic societies. Thus, for example, Dewey (Mayhew and
Edwards 1936) provided one model for schools as a ‘social laboratory’, Neill (1973)
reimagined school as a democratic community and Bloom (Fielding 2005) brought
democracy into a mainstream secondary school. The recent co-operative schools
movement – with 600 plus schools - might reimagine mainstream schooling more widely
(Woodin 2014). Drawing upon a co-operative heritage that has as its core principles
democracy, equality and equity, what kinds of organisational structure, curriculum
process and relation between ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ would be required to realise them?
The response can be seen in the context of the aspirations of the Co-operative College
based in Manchester, UK which having encouraged the co-operative schools movement
seeks to create resources, form networks of schools, create spaces within schools for
democratic debate and decision making that includes both students and teachers and
encourage co-operative forms of learning in order to experience relations of mutuality,
equity and solidarity (Davidge, Facer, Schostak, in: Woodin 2014). However, given the
traditional hierarchical, teacher led forms of formal school organisation co-operative
schools require both cultural and organisational changes to meet the aspirations. This is
not easy. Some will fail outright (Davidge 2017) and some, while employing a
considerable range of co-operative and democratic practices can still engage in a hidden
curriculum through which a master discourse of surveillance, and behavioural control that
is driven by the delivery of state policy defined performance targets typical of the most
disciplinarian of leader-led organisations (Schostak 2014).
This is then the challenge to education: to overcome the discourse of the university as
a process of masters in relation to students, and replace it as the discourse of co-equals
learning to listen to and work with each other, working to produce knowledge,
democratic practices and truths not as fantasies to provide objects that fill a lack or
replace a lost object but rather as the art of living together openly as an end in itself.
Where the master dictates the future, the subject as a free being has none. If the future is
to be written, then it comes into being through the voices and action of equals without
conclusion, since the future knows no conclusion.

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