ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how power is organised between actors in relation to Lacan’s four discourses: the master, the university, the hysteric and the analyst. To understand power, how it develops and how it may be used to construct, subvert and invent worlds requires understanding how discourses configure subjective experience, interpersonal relationships, knowledge, agency and the truth-status of subjects, events and objects. As C. Harber has described, historically and globally schools have promoted not just obedience to authority and deference to one’s ‘betters’ but subjection to tyrants, hostility to others and a willingness to engage in military violence more than they have promoted democracy and the processes of co-operation and peace. More widely, schooling takes place when the minds of the many are shaped by a variety of institutions – whether places of work or the communications media owned and directed by power elites – impacting upon the lives of people.
