Xplore Berlin 2017

Activity: Talk or presentationConference PresentationsResearch

Sacha Kagan - Speaker

BDSM Sagacity: embodying complexity

Contradictions, paradox and taboo-breaking lie at the core of the intense fascination of BDSM for its practitioners. As argued by Volker Woltersdorff: “Unlike in many other discourses that rely on dialectics, in BDSM, the tension between contradictions is not resolved at a higher stage of consciousness – or the thrill is lost. Therefore, BDSM pushes us to conceive of another kind of complementarity that differs from the kind of ‘synthesis’ offered by classical dialectics.” This other way of dealing with dualities comes closest to the “dia-logics” of Edgar Morin (even more than to the “dialogic” of Mikhail Bakhtin).

Beyond stereotypical role-play, BDSM practice can maintain ambivalences and revels in ambiguities, mediating between several realities without flattening them. In this, BDSM play and lifestyles can foster a sensibility to qualitative complexity (after Edgar Morin) through a heightened corporeal, sensual, emotional and aesthetic experience.

In his lecture-intervention at Xplore, reflecting on one’s own and others’ practice, Sacha Kagan will map out together with the participants different ways in which BDSM constitutes a potential playing field allowing us to explore and experiment with constructions, boundaries and the (de/re)formations of diverse dualities beyond a dichotomic form (which are relevant across our existence in terms of sexuality, gender, communities, religion, politics, nature, identity, etc.): self vs. other, active vs. passive, dominant vs. submissive, control vs. surrender, pain vs. pleasure, selfish vs. selfless, transcendent vs. immanent, profane vs. spiritual, emancipatory vs. alienating, independent vs. dependent vs. inter-dependent, etc.

For example: Power relations and their complex tensions acquire a rich, complex substance when experienced, explored and. BDSM practitioners speak about a “flow” of power that passes among the submissive and dominant partners, and discourses of BDSM evoke a “power exchange”. This allows to experience and think of power beyond simplistic dichotomies of domination/submission and oppression/servitude, while gaining a heightened awareness of the various degrees and forms of effective domination and oppression, as well as the conditions and complicities that allow them.

It may well be that our civilization, in an age marked by growing conflicts and planetary ecological, political and economic threats, will not survive as long as we continue to live mostly by simplistically dichotomic schematas and metaphors. When reflected carefully, the (aesth)et(h)ics of complexity that is exercised in BDSM (and elsewhere), trains a potent sagacity that may be further put at use in social learning processes eventually helping us navigate beyond today’s unsustainable times.
14.07.201716.07.2017

Event

Xplore Berlin 2017

14.07.1716.07.17

Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Event: Other

    Research areas

  • Transdisciplinary studies - embodied learning, queer ecologies, embodiment, queer studies, qualitative complexity
  • Sociology - BDSM, sociology of sexuality, sociology of the arts

Links

Recently viewed

Activities

  1. "Curious and Concerned" – A mixed-methods study of teacher educators’ AI literacy, usage experience, and perceptions
  2. Conference of SIG4 'Higher Education' & SIG17 'Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches to Learning and Instruction'
  3. Assessing cognitive abilities for L2 learning: A review of accessible tools
  4. Dimension theory of representations of real numbers
  5. Project Workshop on "Worker Flows, Match Quality, and Productivity" - 2019
  6. Plenary Speaker at the 2022 5th IEEE International Conference on Information Communication and Signal Processing (ICICSP 2022). Plenary entitled "Soft Optimal Computing Techniques to Identify and Control Surface Roughness in Manufacturing".
  7. A Tool for Applications: Wavelet Packets
  8. E-learning module on “Participation” in the context of IWRM – “Social Science” Part
  9. The 22nd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2023)
  10. Monitoring Phenological phases of the crops using TerraSAR-X Spotlight Images based on Factor Analysis
  11. Unit Root & Cointegration Testing Conference 2005
  12. Contingency and Management
  13. Explaining the learning progress in mathematics of retained students and low-achieving students
  14. Combining SMC and MTPA Using an EKF to estimate parameters and states of an interior PMSM
  15. PEAR - Provenance Event and Archives Reconciliation
  16. Multi-stakeholder learning in transdisciplinary settings
  17. Maximum-Likelihood-Based Panel Cointegration Test with Linear Time Trend
  18. Reprocessing from the inside: Employees' perception of participative CSR approaches
  19. Many Paths to Language 2020
  20. Commitment Strategies for Sustainability: How Corporations Can Create Value through New Governance
  21. PhD Workshop on Theories in Information Systems Science

Publications

  1. Closed-form Solution for the Direct Kinematics Problem of the Planar 3-RPR Parallel Mechanism
  2. Towards productive functions?
  3. Factored MDPs for detecting topics of user sessions
  4. Who can receive the pass? A computational model for quantifying availability in soccer
  5. An Outcome-Oriented, Social-Ecological Framework for Assessing Protected Area Effectiveness
  6. Aspect-oriented software development
  7. Combining Evaluative and Generative Diagnosis in ActiveMath
  8. “Ideation is Fine, but Execution is Key”
  9. Towards a spatial understanding of identity play
  10. Foreign bias in institutional portfolio allocation
  11. Fuzzy based control of a nonholonomic car-like robot for drive assistant systems
  12. Active and semi-supervised data domain description
  13. Double-fading support - A training approach to complex software systems
  14. Trajectory tracking using MPC and a velocity observer for flat actuator systems in automotive applications
  15. ℓp-norm multiple kernel learning
  16. Individual Scans Fusion in Virtual Knowledge Base for Navigation of Mobile Robotic Group with 3D TVS
  17. Improve a 3D distance measurement accuracy in stereo vision systems using optimization methods’ approach
  18. Functional Richness and Relative Resilience of Bird Communities in Regions with Different Land Use Intensities
  19. Pressure fault recognition and compensation with an adaptive feedforward regulator in a controlled hybrid actuator within engine applications
  20. The impact of goal focus, task type and group size on synchronous net-based collaborative learning discourses
  21. Material flow analysis between dynamic modelling and life cycle assessment
  22. Active plasma resonance spectroscopy: Eigenfunction solutions in spherical geometry
  23. Collaborative benchmarking of functional-structural root architecture models