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.