Dr David Kaposi

The proposed project has two aims. The first is to re-interpret Stanley Milgram’s “obedience to authority” experiments via the quantitative-qualitative empirical analysis of the largest currently researched data-set of experimental sessions (N=120). The second aim is to expand this re-interpretation towards a general theory of social-political violence. Both aims will draw conceptually and methodologically on psychosocial studies and (object) relational psychoanalysis. The analytic focus of the project is the interpretative framework that Milgram constructed to make sense of his laboratory proceedings: a binary moral scenario where the supposed task of his naïve participants was to choose between the experimental authority, who was instructing them to continue administering painful/lethal electric shocks, and the learner/victim, who was begging them to stop. Many important aspects of the “obedience” experiments are now contested, yet this moral framework remains unchallenged. It continues to reinforce the customary bifurcation of violent acts into wholly bad perpetrators (to be exclusively blamed) and wholly innocent victims (to be exclusively empathised with). Empirically, the present project will contest the validity of the binary framework. It will explore alternative ambiguous, ambivalent and even self-contradictory positions within the experiments: a divided learner/victim appealing to yet undermining a potential ally, and a sadistic experimenter whose effectiveness in authorising violence derives not from explicit instructions to participants but from disengagement from participants’ moral existence. Theoretically, the project will then expand this analysis towards a general account of social-political violence. Drawing on psychosocial and (object) relational psychoanalytic resources, violent (internal and external) relations will be highlighted to challenge the customary bifurcation. This potentially troubling alternative framework will introduce the possibility of violent agents who suffer and victims who are violent, and highlight thus a non-binary reality that is constantly in flux and may undermine our very agency.