Abstract
Research indicates that upwards of 80% of our students experience the devastation of bullying during their school years. To date, research on bullying has mainly employed empirical methodologies, including quantitative and qualitative approaches. This research has largely concluded that bullying is situated in a lack of skill, understanding, or self-control and involves intentional action directed toward status dominance. Based upon these assumptions current anti-bullying strategies focus on training students toward more appropriate avenues of status acquisition and social interaction. Against the backdrop of an actual bullying encounter this paper employs a psychoanalytic philosophical lens to offer a fresh perspective on this enduring educational issue. Employing the philosophical work of Adam Phillips, Jessica Benjamin, and Emmanuel Ghent I ask the question: What is the desire to bully a desire for? Here I consider what is sought and what is at stake in the typical bullying encounter. Through careful analysis I argue that the domination represented in bullying is not simply situated in a lack of social skills or in disregulated aggression––skill deficiencies that require training. Instead, or perhaps in addition to these possibilities, I contend that bullying is foundationally a move toward establishing identity, a self. On this view bullying becomes an activity of self construction through attempted omnipotence. I argue that the status dominance inherent in bullying should be seen not as an end (a tool to secure resources or privilege), but as a means to something more foundational. I conclude that status dominance becomes a means toward the end of providing a secure place for the self to stand. Hence, instead of advocating that we train students to get along better this paper outlines the futility, as well as the insatiability of bullying, opening up new territory focused upon a re-construction of the bully through the relational bonding and differentiation available in the concrete Other.
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Notes
One response to bullying involves “training” the victim to become more socially adept. This strategy is based upon the notion that the victim is the main focus of bullying. But, in essence, on the view I am espousing here, the victim is an “empty signifier” (i.e., he or she is incidental to the project of bullying). The real focus of bullying is identity constructed through the watching eyes of peers. It is in the destruction of another (not necessarily a particular other), in the sight of a watching crowd (most bullying happens in social contexts), that self-construction is attempted. On this view, “fixing” the victim often simply moves the bully to a new victim (hence, Trent).
I am not arguing that all domination is the result of fear. While fear certainly may be an active element in the bullying dynamic, we might also imagine a number of other motivations driving the bully’s domination (e.g., the securing of material resources, disregulated aggression, etc.). By considering domination as centered in fear I am not intending to close down other possibilities, but instead to raise an additional lens through which to view the bullying encounter.
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Jacobson, R.B. A Place to Stand: Intersubjectivity and the Desire to Dominate. Stud Philos Educ 29, 35–51 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-009-9156-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-009-9156-0