Original Research

On madness and eros: Thoughts on an arrested present

Carina Venter

Received: 16 Feb. 2025; Accepted: 18 July 2025; Published: 10 Dec. 2025

Copyright: © 2025. The Author Licensee: AOSIS.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Abstract

This article listens through an account given by a participant interviewed as part of an ongoing project on abuse in music-pedagogical and music-professional spaces in South Africa. It follows two trajectories in this account, which narrates the relationship between the participant, music and the master pedagogue: one that narrates the potential held in the relation between master and disciple in the language of freedom and self-realisation, the other in the language of madness and the asylum. How might this account be heard in the arrested present of post-apartheid South Africa? This article offers two responses. First, it argues that the emotional abuse described in the music-pedagogical account at the centre of this article enacts a foreclosure of the erotics of knowledge and communication some have seen as fundamental both to pedagogy and political emancipation. Second, the failure, artistically and politically, to which this pedagogical encounter leads – a failure at the practice of Western art music which, in apartheid South Africa, marked out the cultural preserve of whiteness – constitutes a very particular kind of failure that puts bodies in those places assigned to them by apartheid. Taken together, the account and these responses show how apartheid is sedimented pedagogically as a renewed affront that plays with desire as it refuses knowledge and emancipative politics.

Contribution: This article is the first to consider abuse in classical music pedagogy in South Africa and suggests new theoretical ground by theorising ‘the pornographic in pedagogy’.

Keywords: music pedagogy; emotional abuse; race; emancipation; post-apartheid education; desire and knowledge; eros and pedagogy.

It is Madness

it is madness

this building

  with its windows

  Cold and closed

   so that not even the stale air can escape

  with its stark and bare corridors

     sunken below the ground

    the sterile fluorescent lighting overwhelming everything

  with its countless doors

     their iron locks and tiny square portholes

    piercing the white at regular intervals

   like the screeches and moans and shudders

  continuously cutting through the stifling dank smell

it is madness

these lunatics sealed in their padded cells

  not permitted to leave their rooms but for a few minutes a day

   if they’re good

    they might occasionally be allowed an exit

     even sit in the sun

   their arms jerking

    feet kicking

     fingers spasming

      faces convulsing

  in time to music that only they can hear

it is madness

those people in the coats

  who take the demented

   to the examination rooms

    and probe and poke at brains

     and emotions

      and sanity

       and souls

  with terrifying fingers

    and smiles on faces

   and then send them back to their cells an hour later

  howling and screaming and crying

it is madness

the way that the lucky ones are taken

    above ground

   because they exhibit remarkable signs of progress

     and so wonderfully so yes isn’t it

   and paraded before an approving

     adoring

    public

     that delights in seeing the asylum’s work

      as beauty

       triumph

        art

it is madness

Introduction

This poem was written by a young man I will call Charles. Days after writing it, he tells me, he was diagnosed with a severe mental illness. By this time, he had decided to drop out of music despite being several years Into his studies, chiefly because of what he experienced as emotional abuse.¹ During our interview, Charles told me about the poem he wrote. He subsequently provided me with a copy. It is included here with his permission in altered form.

Charles’s poem is a breaking point into isolation, into a subterranean space with sealed windows from which the stale air cannot escape; a place where time is regulated by routines of practice met by rewards that range from a momentary gasp of air and sun outside the asylum to exhibition before an adoring audience. The poem transforms the music faculty into prison, asylum, laboratory of experimentation and parading ground for the most successful, a space where brains, emotions, sanities and souls are poked at by the terrifying fingers of smiling pedagogues. The work of the asylum is to prepare all and elect few for public consumption in the name of art, triumph and of beauty. Whether or not one is elected, the outcome is consistent: madness. Desire and agency are altogether stripped out of these lines. The ‘lunatics’ are objects being acted upon rather than subjects with agency. They are locked up, ‘allowed’ to leave only occasionally, very seldom beyond the confines of the practice room, and are taken to examination rooms or to be exhibited. Isolation is intensified sonically and affectively by the soundproof practice room or studio, indispensable to the purpose-built space designed for music education, but also a built petrification of the sustained silence and silencing that surround institutionalised abuse.

Charles’s poem opens onto a body of literature and experiences that are not his alone. Erving Goffman (1961) famously understood the asylum as a ‘total institution’:

[A] place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life. (p. xiii)

The ‘closed world of the music school’ meets well the criteria set by Goffman for total institutions, manifested most conspicuously in its separateness from the rest of campus and the confinement of almost all activities – social and educational – to that environment (Roberts 2004). The practice room and music studio have also been portrayed as places of extreme isolation (Burwell, Carey & Bennett 2019). Inside these places of isolation, classical music training can facilitate ‘abuse cultures’ (Tregear 2015), employing methods that depend on ‘authority and correction’ (Bull 2019:126), presided over by pedagogues who, when they have ‘towering individualities … usually are vampires who suck out their pupils’ personality’ (Flesch 1957:35).

And yet, places of music instruction are not prisons, asylums or total institutions in the negative sense. Students are not stripped of agency or locked up in practice rooms, and pedagogues do not don lab coats and perform medical experiments. Nor must evocations of an asylum and extreme isolation necessarily imply madness or abuse. Goffman, after all, recognised that asylums could serve various functions: offering care (such as homes for the elderly), protection (mental hospitals), withdrawal (monasteries) or instruction (boarding schools) (1961:4–5; cf. DeNora 2013:34). Extending Goffman’s work on asylums to music, Tia DeNora (2013) has understood asylums as places or spaces (actual or – like music – ephemeral or conceptual) of protection or play, rest and remaking, withdrawal and pleasure (p. 47). How, then, are we to understand this extreme metaphorisation of the music faculty as a place of isolation, as an asylum that specialises in the simultaneous production of madness and high art?

Shadows of abuse in classical music pedagogy

There is a near absence of research systematically documenting harm in classical music (Bull 2019:90; Ramstedt 2023a:200).² MacArthur (2011) suggests that accounts of abuse are mostly limited to anecdote, and thus outside the domain of ‘scientific rigour’ of scholarly work. Unsurprisingly, non-peer-reviewed spaces have engaged abuse critically and creatively. Ian Pace’s (2014) ‘Index of major original articles on abuse’ is an important resource cataloguing cases of abuse, press coverage, inquiries and longer historical considerations mostly restricted to England. Film and fiction, too, have explored emotional, psychological and sexual abuse in music pedagogy. Whiplash (2014) is a film that forcefully surfaces the subject of emotional abuse and the destructive excesses of competitive cultures. Ian Mcewan’s (2022) novel, Lessons, charts a more nuanced path intersecting adolescent sexual discovery and ‘eroticised terror’ (Silcox 2022) involving a piano teacher and her teenaged student. Tár (2022), a film named after its fictional female protagonist Lydia Tar, follows the gradual psychological unravelling of a highly successful orchestral conductor who is accused of sexual abuse and eventually dismissed from her position. Rather than the figure of the patriarchal white male conductor presiding dictatorially over his orchestra, Lydia embodies a different and more inclusive future: a lesbian woman with a community project and serious academic interests in non-Western music elected to the prestigious position of chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. Lydia has understood how to wield power and charisma. As one reviewer wrote, she:

[D]oes not fit the mold of an openly tyrannical boss or an irate, bullish tycoon. She is, more chillingly, able to control her surroundings through the artful subtlety of a cold stare, a warm hand, or the rebuffing of a too-needy request. (Gevinson 2022)

Tár renders the twisted dynamics of abuse at once visible and concealed. When allegations of student shaming and sexual conduct surface, the precise calibration between agency, obsessive desire and an abuse of power remains elusive. It is even conceivable that Lydia herself is a victim – of cancel culture. At the same time, her formidable charisma may well be what enables the machinery of abuse, as she initiates sexual relationships with students and assistants waiting for their career break as conductors. Or perhaps those very students and hopeful assistants exercise their own degree of agency within this blurry game of uncertain yet fatal transgressions.

Tár, Lessons and Whiplash, show that the cultures subtending music-pedagogical spaces are shadowed by harm. Pace (2015) writes that classical music education utilises ‘a systematic pattern of domination, cruelty, dehumanisation, bullying and emotional manipulation from scrupulous musicians in positions of unchecked power, of which sexual abuse is one of several manifestations’. Bull (2019) also stresses the ubiquity of abusive behaviour, writing that ‘emotional abuse [is] an accepted and normalised part of the culture of classical music education’ (p. 190). Wagner (2015) has mapped this process of normalisation in a book that considers the assimilation and socialisation of the elite performer from early childhood into adulthood. The story she tells is one of authority, submission, blackmail, passion and emotional abuse. Whereas Wagner focusses on the production of elite performers, Geoffrey Baker’s (2014) ethnography of the Venezuelan youth music project, El Sistema, has revealed the darker underside of community programmes and the disciplining of bodies, often in a manner that humiliates and shames, seemingly in the interest of ‘weeding out’ the weaker and socio-economically vulnerable students in the project (p. 96). The typical climate that invites such practices of shaming is succinctly captured by Bruno Nettl (1995): music schools, particularly those overwhelmingly committed to Western art music, are devoted to mastery, masters and mastering (p. 32), whereas Daniel Leech-Wilkinson (2018) has emphasised the prescriptive conformity integral to such environments. Others have addressed the fraught terrain of asymmetric power relations with reference to one-to-one teaching (Gaunt 2009), orchestras and choirs (Bull 2019, 2021; O’tool 1994), and the conservatorium more generally (Perkins 2013).

Burwell (2023) provides an in-depth consideration of the power relations at play in the one-to-one teaching studio, noting its positive and negative effects, dyadic, contingent and situated relational structure (p. 354) and urging for continued critical engagement. In an earlier article (2016), she demonstrates this situatedness and contingency, showing how students respond differently to a particular teaching style. Whereas the majority of students interviewed in her study spoke with praise about their teacher, one in particular held a contrary view: ‘I want more self-discovery, exploring different ways of doing things; I don’t want to be told that there is a definitive way’ (p. 502). Expressing concern over the subservience expected by the teacher, this student noted how the teacher’s ‘guitar was speaking to me and commanding me’ (p. 503). At the extreme end of metaphors of command is the language of master and slave, trafficking in the production of ‘slave driver and slave’ as talented performers become ‘slaves to music making’ (Sosniak 1985:421). In this relational economy, the boundaries blur between teacher, master, slave driver and the activity of music-making itself, each standing in for the other in a command of total devotion to art and pedagogue alike. One student recalls their teacher as ‘impossible task master’: ‘He would sit there … You played a concert, you didn’t play a lesson … You would get torn apart for an hour’ (p. 421). This same student experienced such behaviour as necessary – even as something they should be grateful for (pp. 421–422) – emphasising the normalisation of abuse cultures in classical music pedagogy (Tregear 2015).

An intersectional politics shapes the unfolding of this relational economy between music, performers and pedagogues. Whiteness and masculinity provide the ideal types for its realisation (Ramstedt 2023a), parsed differently by gender and class (Bull 2019). Speaking enthusiastically about a male conductor, one female participant in Bull’s (2019) study noted how ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m his dog! – but in a good way!’, to which a male participant added that ‘it is like being in the military – but better than the military!’ (p. 126). These comments reflect gendered patterns – of desire, pleasure and submission in the case of the female participant and of the homosocial pull towards and eventual coming into power and authority by the male participant. The adverse personal costs of cultures where abusive behaviours are normalised are compounded by race, given the foundational whiteness entrenched in and reproduced by routines of training and practice in classical music (Fetokaki 2023). Upshaw (2016) ponders the sharp edges of microaggressions when they encounter race and gender. Reflecting autoethnographically on her experiences at a US-based music conservatorium in the 1980s, her assessment is stark: ‘repeated slights, combined into a larger wound, creating a trauma of spirit and mind’ (p. 268).

Scholarship on music pedagogy, power and the entanglements of structural and subjective violence has largely emerged from the Global North. In South Africa, the darker undercurrents of classical music pedagogy remain critically underexplored. While attention has been paid to abuse in the music industry (Ancell 2024) and allegations of financial exploitation along racial lines – most recently involving Michael Williams and Cape Town Opera (Carrell & Brown 2016) – no South African scholar has yet examined the intersections of abuse and classical music pedagogy. Historical work has addressed racial discrimination in music education, such as the important autoethnographic study by Lewis and Wassermann (2020), and double bassist Leon Bosch has spoken of the ridicule he endured as a student at the University of Cape Town in the 1980s (Moss 2020). These racialised experiences should be historicised in the context of apartheid and colonialism, both of which shaped musical thought and pedagogy in South Africa.³ Together, these scattered accounts begin to trace the contours of an unwritten story – of music, racial thinking, and cultures of abuse in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. This as yet unwritten story is difficult to hear as anything other than echoes of the long afterlife of apartheid: a silence shaped by histories of domination, by the uneasy beauty of a music bound to colonial power and by a lingering desire – perhaps even an imperative – to preserve this tradition unblemished, despite all it carries.

Notes on methodology and ethical considerations

The interview with Charles forms part of a larger project that documents histories of trauma and abuse in South African music-pedagogical and music-professional spaces. Working with accounts of abuse positions this study as sensitive research involving ‘psychic costs’ and/or ‘unwelcome consequences’ for research participants – and potentially also for the researcher (eds. Renzetti & Lee 1993:5). Sensitive research, in other words, poses risks for all involved (Fahie 2014:20). These costs and risks may be emotional and professional, and in exceptional circumstances may also extend to those implied as abusive in participants’ accounts. To minimise the possibility of harm, it is important to understand that sensitive research involves a tension between the safety and well-being of participants and what a researcher can disclose (eds. Renzetti & Lee 1993:231). Where methodological and other details are not disclosed, it is done to protect the anonymity of participants.

Institutional review boards scrutinise ethics applications and provide reassurances that measures are in place to minimise the costs attached to sensitive research – in this instance, the protection of the identities, well-being and safety of participants and those they have experienced as abusive. This research project duly obtained ethical clearance from the Research Ethics Committee: Social, Behavioural and Education Research at Stellenbosch University (Project Number: 27113) on 02 March 2023. All participants in this project were sent a consent form prior to their interview, which was conducted either online or at a location of their choice. At the beginning of the interview, participants were given the opportunity to raise questions or request clarification on any matter in relation to the content of the consent form or the research project more generally. They were also provided with details of a free counselling/support service and encouraged to make use of it should emotional or psychological support be required.

The emergent nature of sensitive research (eds. Renzetti & Lee 1993:4) necessitates engagement with questions of ethics, costs and risks beyond institutional approvals and informed consent. In a project where I do not seek to interview perceived perpetrators and listen only to accounts of abuse as experienced by participants, I can only hear one side of a story.

That one side, in the arrested present of post-apartheid South Africa, fractures into many sides as experiences of abuse recounted to me overlay the historical patterns, the lines of unequal oppression and flight edged into the present by a deeply divided and divisive past. Despite these many sides, I can hear only the voices of participants. Writing with the fragile consensus of subjective memory and experience, what about questions of verifiability – and the possibility that I might be listening to half-truths or falsifications?

The stories I am telling are accounts of abuse as experienced by participants. The current project does not go beyond listening, documentation and theorisation. Participants understand that reporting perceived perpetrators is not the role of the researcher; at best, their experiences can raise awareness of the perennial problem of abuse in music pedagogy and help foster better reporting practices and safeguards for potential victims.

In cases where those accounts have been skewed – whether deliberately or due to the necessary obfuscations and defences that guard those doors closed on trauma and memory – I suspect I am listening to shards of other stories as yet untold. Stories that may never be told in full. I know of these other untold stories because of the prolonged silence in South African music-pedagogical and professional spaces about precisely these histories. And I sense their faint outlines from those who declined to be interviewed for this project.

Another risk has to do with anonymity. In the case of sensitive research, extreme caution should be taken to protect the privacy, identities and confidentiality of participants (Liamputtong 2006:32). Participants were given the opportunity to choose their own pseudonym or to ask the researcher to select one on their behalf. Additional measures to safeguard anonymity include anonymising all institutions, requesting participants not to name those they have experienced as abusive and not disclosing a participant’s age, musical instrument or location of study. Thorough anonymisation does not change how – unavoidably – a certain and very human kind of reader scavenges for openings in the necessary veil of changed names and places. The compulsion to identify – especially those experienced by participants as abusive – is ever-present in a project of this kind. Fahie (2014:25) relates how he was prompted about the identity of a perpetrator in a private conversation initiated by a session chair at a conference where he presented findings on workplace bullying. This kind of listening and reading places the researcher, perceived perpetrator and participant at risk – personally, professionally and emotionally. I can only ask readers to hold responsibly the paranoid urge to identify, and to take seriously the imperative of anonymity in conducting and engaging with sensitive research.

Analytically, this study is grounded in social constructionism (Creswell & Poth 2018). I understand knowledge and experience as situated in particular discourses, bodies, regimes of power, sensory orders and structures of feeling, rather than as objective realities open to stable or tidy interpretation. This approach is consistent with psycho-social discursive analysis (Taylor 2015).

Discourse analysis involves prolonged engagement with materials in which the researcher notices ‘features of interest without settling on these’ (Taylor 2001:39). It does not rely on narrow coding practices. What distinguishes this form of analysis is not the coding process itself, but rather the attentiveness to language and the theoretical orientation of the research (p. 39). My aim is not to reduce accounts to predefined categories and codes, but to listen with and through them to the openings they offer for further theorisation.

An account

When I interview Charles, I am struck by his certain speech, his sentences traversing what appear to be well-trodden passages to difficult places he has been before. Charles tells me he was suicidal for much of the time he studied music, that he came close to taking his own life shortly after, that he self-harmed. He is queer, brown (the designation is his) and a first-generation university student; his body and family history marking out a space apart from the normativity assumed by the schools and university that complete his educational trajectory. At least during his primary and high school years, music provided the social capital that purchased for him a sense of belonging. Music was ‘the cool thing to do’, he explains, a way into a white, heteronormative world for a brown, queer boy.

But this positioning of music emerges only later on in our interview. Much earlier, less than 3 min in, race and class frame Charles’s account of his high school years in a story that unfolds a fairly familiar trajectory, propelling him headlong into the alienating pull of white, Western culture. He encounters Bach’s music in the school choir and is enamoured by the sounds he hears, although perplexed because everyone else (mostly white children) seems so well trained in belonging to this world of counterpoint and the German language. Clearly gifted at his instrument, he excels and decides to study music after school.

At university, Charles tells me, he had to ‘juggle’ different traumas. Music, the social capital that purchased belonging despite race, class and sexuality, was rapidly liquidated when he moved into his university residence. Prevented from fulfilling the social expectations that ensured a collective belonging in his residence because he is always practising his instrument, Charles is called a ‘sneaker’, a word that, for those infected by the mind of apartheid, triggers fears of the ‘insluiper’ (the sneaker-in), the dangerous person of ‘mixed blood’ and contaminator of the Afrikaner blood line who sneaks into the houses of pure Afrikaners under cover of dark to corrupt and pervert the purity of the volk (Coetzee 1991:10–13).⁴ The mind of apartheid lives on in post-apartheid South Africa, contorting desire wherever it lingers. Charles recalls a remark by a female student: ‘He is attractive, but a Coloured’.⁵ Attractive but coloured, therefore still the ‘sneaker’. Others call him ‘a Muslim’s arse’ and he is told to ‘return to the coolies’. When he uses the lift, others sometimes get out, preferring to take the stairs rather than share space with him. Male students mock in a shouting singsong: ‘He likes dicks. He is a faggot’. In the university residence, the discrimination is loud, in his face, on his body, in the lift, outside his door.

Over the course of our conversation, Charles speaks about music and pedagogy in two vocabularies as his language strains to hold together two distinctly oppositional yet coexistent worlds. One of these speaks of a hopeful ecstatic world, the other of isolation and madness. Charles relates how he was ‘smitten’ with his Instrument. Upon first encountering the pedagogue he would later experience as abusive, he felt that studying music ‘was going to be paradise because it seemed based on this lesson that this was what studying music was going to be like – absolute heaven’. The master enters here as the one ‘who set[s] obsession on its way’, in the words of George Steiner (2003:19). But invoking the master also ‘carries the stain of slavery’ (p. 124). This darker side of mastery and being mastered is marked in Charles’s poem by a litany of adjectives, nouns and verbs descriptive of trauma, incarceration and insanity.

When I ask Charles about the abuse he experienced in the university where he studied music, his answer unspools a different configuration of the two worlds that thread through his interview: the world of paradise and that of the asylum. Outside the teaching studio, the pedagogue radiates warmth and encouragement. ‘He has this aura of being so kind and supportive’, explains Charles, adding, ‘everyone can see it’. The other world, the abusive one, takes over when Charles plays. ‘Show me’, the pedagogue would say. So, Charles shows, plays. The pedagogue’s response was never predictable, irrespective of Charles’s level of preparedness. At times, his playing would induce yelling from the pedagogue who occasionally stormed out of the room. On other days, pedagogy did its work. Charles remembers:

‘I put a lot of effort into a new piece, and I started playing and he would just say, no, stop! And then he would say, play again and I’d start again, and he would say, stop! Play again and I’m like I don’t know what you want from me.’

Charles never works out what the pedagogue wants from him, a point to which I will return. No matter how hard he practises, the pedagogue tells him he is wasting time, not taking his career seriously, has no career in front of him, that he would be better off giving up music. Charles completes that year with exceptional grades. The sense of failure – of not being good enough – is the artificial conditioning of failure exacerbated by the pedagogue. Charles never confronts what had happened, and takes no action. His musical world remains oddly sealed off from his politics, sealed off from the outside like the asylum of his poem. In his university residence, he responds differently. Over time, Charles begins to speak out. He is ignored, persists and is eventually taken seriously. This part of Charles’s account begins with abuse and ends in important anti-discrimination activism.

How might we hear this account of isolation, of resignation in one domain (sound and pedagogy) and activism elsewhere, in the arrested present of post-apartheid South Africa? To answer this question, I follow the two worlds, that of the asylum and that of the desire to become through knowledge and sound, set in motion in Charles’s account. Firstly, I argue that the emotional abuse described in the music-pedagogical account at the centre of this article enacts a foreclosure of the erotics of knowledge and communication that critics such as George Steiner (2003) and bell hooks (1993) have suggested to be fundamental both to pedagogy and political emancipation. Secondly, the failure, artistically and politically, to which this pedagogical encounter leads – a failure at the practice of Western art music, which, in apartheid South Africa, marked out the cultural preserve of whiteness – constitutes a very particular kind of failure that puts bodies in the places assigned them by apartheid. Taken together, the account and these responses, although not providing an exact replication of the ‘affective disorder’ of apartheid (Froneman 2023:101), which relies for its operations on race and racism, show how that affective disorder is sedimented pedagogically as a renewed affront that plays with desire as it refuses knowledge and emancipative politics.

Eros, music, pedagogy and the political

I have put into play a series of concepts including the erotic, desire and self-realisation, a list to which I will also add intimacy, without regard for precise definitions. This approach to concepts, a perverse interchangeability that sets up leaky boundaries between words and allows the bundle of meanings bound up with one concept to energise another, is the kind of conceptual looseness analytical philosophers find suspect, certain types of psychologists revile, and deconstructionists and close readers revel in. The entire discourse surrounding the erotic operates a series of such slippages, anchored by the poles of sexual encounter at one end and self-realisation at the other. These poles are illustrated succinctly (and moreover pressed into the service of demarcating feminism) when Jane Gallop (1997:4–6), reflecting on her student years, positions desire for sexual pleasure and the desire for knowledge as part of the same transformation which, in her case, was enabled by a body of feminist literature.⁶ Her account is of a particular confluence of reading and awakening, of reading as awakening, but depends, of course, on the particularity of her own sexuality, a body of literature and a personal history.

Bodily desire and erotic pleasure remain largely ignored in music-pedagogical considerations (Gould 2009:66). And yet, eroticism has a long history in music. Whether in early modern music (eds. Blackburn & Stras 2015), 19th-century symphonic and operatic repertoire (Downes 2006) or evocations of the orient (Brett 2006), eroticism subtends sound, refuses its disciplining, covers its propensity for ‘othering’ and creates openings for hearing otherwise. In a deeply personal essay, feminist musicologist Suzanne Cusick (2006) refracts questions of becoming and relationality through her own sexuality and, crucially, through music. Pushing descriptive language to the extremes of that series of slippages enabled by eroticism, Cusick unfolds her own relation to music and sex in evocative terms. Listening to music, she suggests, experientially approximates eroticism as a mode of becoming and being in relation to the world: ‘like good sex, it [listening to music] is an experience that re-teaches me how to relate to the world, how to have the nerve to open myself to it’ (p. 75). But Cusick went further, moving beyond simile to a feminist (or more precisely lesbian) politics that understood music and sex or sexuality as relationally negotiating the same triadic structure – one consisting of power, pleasure and intimacy (pp. 71–73). Music and sex, that is, both structure a relation to power and intimacy that is negotiated through pleasure (p. 78). Reconfiguring this triad pedagogically, the sheer pleasure of listening to and understanding music that Cusick imparted to her students, became a means of teaching them a certain relation to music and, by extension, to the world: not of dominance, but of pleasure and joy not perverted by power (pp. 74–75).

The pedagogical value of eros hinted at in Cusick’s work is indebted to Plato’s extensive writings on the subject, effectively reorientating Eros towards a pedagogy which is simultaneously democratic, political and stripped of any conflict between reason, passion and desire (Burch 2000). Building on this tradition, George Steiner (2003) offers a set of claims that regard eroticism as axiomatic to pedagogy:

Eroticism, covert or declared, fantasized or enacted, is inwoven in teaching, in the phenomenology of mastery and discipleship. … The pulse of teaching is persuasion. The teacher solicits attention, agreement, and, optimally, collaborative dissent. He or she invites trust: ‘to exchange love for love and trust for trust’ as Marx put it, idealistically, in his 1844 manuscripts. Persuasion is both positive – ‘share this skill with me, follow me into this art and practise, read this text’ – and negative – ‘do not believe this, do not expend effort and time on that’. The dynamics are the same: to build a community out of communication, a coherence of shared feelings, passions, refusals. (p. 26)

When Steiner talks about eroticism, love and teaching, he is integrating into the pedagogical relation – indeed, in the approach to knowledge and creativity itself – the affective potential carried in eroticism, a potential that sublimates as obsession, persuasion and even infatuation. Eroticism in teaching, crucially, elicits these intensities not in service of sexual pleasure or harassment, but ‘to build a community out of communication, a coherence of shared feelings, passions, refusals’. Whether the master bestows criticism, praise or encouragement, the purpose is inviting what Steiner calls ‘collaborative dissent’. In pointing to eroticism in that most sacred necessity of teaching, communication and the building of a community, a speaking with and against the teacher, Steiner is quite precise in depicting the work eroticism can do on pedagogy. Counterintuitively, it is a precision enabled by a slippage between meanings, a perverse relation to definitions that makes it possible to hold onto eroticism as pedagogical potential in a refusal wholly to commit the erotic to the discourse of sexual harassment and unequal power relations.

The refusal to subsume eroticism into its corrupted forms has a longer trajectory in liberatory politics. Whereas Steiner’s concern is eroticism as rhetorical and persuasive force, he is less interested in eroticism as a space that pulls into pedagogy the subject as endowed with political and emancipative agency. bell hooks (1993:60) positions eros as ‘epistemological grounding’ and a force that carries us towards self-realisation. Audre Lorde (2007:53) is helpful to think with when she positions eroticism as central to the political and poetic work of change, a resource of power and knowledge whose corruption is the aim of oppressive orders. Eros is not only repressed, but corrupted by the pornographic that forces out ‘true feeling’ which is replaced with ‘sensation’ (p. 54).

Lorde is of course offering eroticism as an avenue to power, knowledge and change in the context of women who have, for centuries, been installed as passive recipients of eroticism, or even wholly uninterested in it. Her underlying premise – that eros as emancipative power may be practised productively – has interesting corollaries when brought to bear on apartheid South Africa and the ongoing project of theorising post-apartheid desire. That eroticism, that desire itself, has a long history of policing in South Africa, is uncontroversial. One need only think of J. M. Coetzee’s (1991:18) well-known characterisation of apartheid as ‘a counter-attack upon desire’. That counterattack upon desire was enshrined legally through the Immorality Act which prosecuted more white men than men or women of any other racial group (Klausen 2022:160, 162) and spatially and affectively through what Premesh Lalu (2023:1–2) calls petty or everyday apartheid. The premise of Lalu’s book on the post-apartheid condition is that petty apartheid ‘appeared to have wedged itself in the circuits of sense and perception, leaving little room for manoeuvre or escape, and even less for desire’ (p. 2). Lalu’s immediate concern is education. One iteration of apartheid’s corruptive work registers as a binary between liberation and education, realised politically as the choice to revolt or remain in school: whether to break down, through active protest and revolt, apartheid’s stronghold or to study in pursuit of knowledge even if such knowledge is dispensed by the system against which it revolts. Lalu’s broader point, though, is that apartheid’s corruption of education places at risk the desire for post-apartheid freedom and has indeed disenchanted that desire for freedom. At the least, he is suggesting that apartheid’s corruptive work lingers in the sensory and affective spaces of post-apartheid education, a lingering that traps freedom and desire in conflicts, binaries and states of mind bequeathed us by apartheid. Lalu’s work, alongside Charles’s account, raises the question towards which I am theorising: whether the policing of desire and the psychic architecture that instituted its realisation, coupled with the warping of politics and knowledge, is present as the foreclosure of certain kinds of knowledge and self-realisation in post-apartheid South Africa – a psychic architecture that initially worked to police desire and corrupt knowledge, but is displaced as well onto music-pedagogical spaces.

Eros and a refusal of community or communication

How are desire and eros present in Charles’s account? In a narrow sense, eros as a certain physical energy is present playfully in the pedagogue’s language and bodily comportment. Charles is addressed in a register that pulses with affection, a kind of gay camp that deploys gender bending and affectionate naming in playful interaction. There is bodily intimacy: a hug or a hand on the shoulder. These intimacies, spoken and embodied, do not feel threatening or transgressive, nor does Charles wish to interpret them as such. In a later interview, I ask him again to reflect on the physical proximity and the playful speech:

‘It never felt as if he was aiming to do anything sexual, but it felt like stepping into a sphere of intimacy. He made me feel as if this was a safe space to a point where we were two adults doing music together and are both gay men and we can both joke about sex stuff. That is how comfortable we are with each other.’

These physical signals and the playful speech imbue pedagogical potential with the sense of safety and intimacy, a homosocial bond between men that meshes eroticism with pedagogy. In a more general sense, that about which Steiner and Lorde write, for example, eroticism is present as potentiality and desire, the potential for self-realisation and transformative knowledge, when Charles fantasises about music as paradise and heaven. As bell hooks (1993) notes in her essay on pedagogy and eroticism, quoting Thomas Merten:

[T]he original and authentic ‘paradise’ idea, both in the monastery and the university, implied not simply a celestial store of theoretic ideas to which the Magistri and Doctores held the key, but the inner self of the student who would discover the ground of their being in relation [to] themselves, to higher powers, to community. (p. 64)

The promise of community was, at least at school, realised for Charles through music, which held out the simultaneous potentiality of belonging and estrangement as a queer person of colour. Music, for him, provided a medium where difference could be crossed and crossed out, but also that portal into paradise and self-realisation which invests music with the charge of desire and subjectivity. It is this possibility which is foreclosed by the pedagogue, as is evident in the following incident Charles experienced as particularly abusive:

‘Eventually he came and stood facing me and said, like I was testing every last fibre of his patience… He would play the first note and say, play! And I would have to mimic the first note. “Play it again” and I have to mimic and he would play it again and I had to mimic. Then he would do the first two notes and I have to mimic. No communication on what I was doing right or wrong. If he hadn’t just expected me to mimic … maybe give me some concrete guidance on what the differences were.’

What is it the other wants from me, the teacher, the master? we can ask with Jacques Lacan (see Hook 2008:277). For Lacan, this question is what ultimately propels desire, sets subjectivity on its way. It is in trying to work out what the other wants that we get to know better our own desires, that those very desires are formed in response to not knowing what the other wants. Desire, then, is not to be understood narrowly as sexual or physical in this reading. It is bound up with the process of becoming a subject, a process also fundamental to pedagogy. In this account, Charles is wanting to understand what the master wants, how the master is wanting him to sound. What the Lacanian reading makes visible is that Charles’s own subjectivity and desire formations are at stake, precisely as he seeks to work out what it is the other, the master, wants from him.

In this working out, the potentiality of discovery propelled by desire is foreclosed by the master. The master refuses creativity and experimentation, and responds with the injunction to mimic: a note is played, mimicked, then two notes, then three, in an act of mechanised mimicry that splits pedagogy into a vacuous sensation and a foreclosure of feeling and knowing through sound. ‘Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling’, says Lorde (2007:54) when she writes about the corruption of eros. The pedagogical trajectory followed by the master conforms to something of this corruption. The master in Charles’s account signals intimacy through playful speech and bodily proximity. This intimacy leads not to self-knowledge and discovery, which is Steiner’s point about effective pedagogy. It leads instead to mechanical repetition and precisely the foreclosure of knowledge. Is this not the meaning of the pornographic in music pedagogy? The corruption of eros as creativity and self-discovery as sound is reduced to a play of sensations, stripped of feeling and that potentiality for transformative knowledge and instruction. Pedagogy, then, as a refusal to allow sensation to be sublimated into the fullest language of self-articulation and becoming.

I want to be very precise in what I am suggesting. It is not that Charles or the pedagogue had sexual expectations. Charles is clear about this in his account:

‘It never felt as if he was aiming to do anything sexual, but it felt like stepping into a sphere of intimacy. It became increasingly difficult to reconcile [this intimacy] with where the abuse was coming from because it was now in that intimate space as well. While he was touchy, like I mean, I remember being quite taken aback by the physical proximity when he would demonstrate something to me. So, ja, there was a sort of. I won’t say intimacy. It was more like an ignoring of personal barriers which I normally wouldn’t have a problem with, but it felt like an ignoring of me and my being as opposed to a respectful touch. It was like touching to demonstrate for me but also touching to show that he was in control. There was definitely no sexual advances, there was just sexualised talk but it was definitely the conduit for abuse.’

Sexualised talk is the ‘conduit for abuse’, says Charles. Charles is not suggesting that a certain playful register should be expelled from the pedagogical space. The way in which this register creates intimacy and then concludes in emotional abuse as a refusal of pedagogical responsibility is what prompts the comparison with the pornographic, not any sexual expectations on the part of either. There is a particular arc to this account: intimacy, its withdrawal, a touch that feels like control and a disrespecting of the self and then the replication of this process in sound: the pedagogue plays a note, tells Charles to repeat the note, plays two notes, and so on. What precisely is the abuse here? It is a commitment to pedagogy as intimate, as a path onto ‘community through communication’ and ‘collective dissent’ (Steiner 2003:26), and the refusal of that promise, which lives on as vacuousness and intimate speech and sound as a meaningless play of sensations, deprived of feeling and knowledge.

Putting bodies in place in the arrested present

Race and class show up throughout Charles’s account, but never in relation to the pedagogue. ‘There are sexist and racist traditions in residences against which I spoke out because they were tied to apartheid’, Charles explains. Not inherited from apartheid, but tied to apartheid. These traditions tie bodies to apartheid differently. In Charles’s case, this tying is a tying to apartheid through race, class and sexism. Charles’s arrival at university ties him to otherness articulated through sexuality and race: ‘I almost feel like I am not part of the country’, he explains. His act of gradually untying himself from apartheid in his residence occurs through an emancipative politics which culminates in change: Charles makes clear that there is no place for these traditions in the post-apartheid present.

A different answer emerges when I ask him about race, whiteness and the remains of apartheid in music pedagogy:

The more you see the same patterns and you can keep on zooming in on every single layer and you will see little patterns resembling the largest scale things. So there is this violence of saying, this is the way the music should be and you are not doing it right carries with it this idea that there is one particular kind of good music and other music is not good and that is particularly Western music and you don’t understand it as a poor brown person in Africa because there is this weird Germanic fetish, it feels almost like an outpost of Europe … I guess at every conceivable level you see the same sort of abuse.

Failure at Western art music, pedagogically inflicted through emotional abuse – the artificial creation of failure through pedagogy as the pornographic denial of feeling and knowledge – is a very particular kind of failure for Charles, who identifies as brown and queer. It is an artificially induced failure in a music historically reserved to do the work of cultural segregation, a failure, then, in which the racialised body recognises the familiar practice of subordination that could use Western art music as a means to put bodies in those places preassigned to them by the mind of apartheid.

Throughout his account, Charles never makes a case that Western art music and its instruments should be expunged from the curriculum. Quite the contrary. In the years he studied music, he was asking to know himself, as a queer person of colour, who wishes to play, feel and think through this music. The response of the master that ultimately refuses him entry into this world is felt as a response that returns bodies to their preassigned places. Charles’s poem, through this reading, becomes a poem about a body that is returned to its place, separate, apart, incarcerated in a place and a pedagogy that renews through sound the isolation practised by apartheid.

Conclusion

Why insist on a reading of the material before me in relation to eros, desire and ultimately a certain pedagogy that gestures towards intimacy as an opening onto the creation of artificial failure, a refusal of self-knowledge, and the reduction of pedagogy to a play of sensations deprived of feeling and thought? Firstly, my concern with eros and desire stems partly from Charles’s account and, more specifically, the approach of the pedagogue – an approach that evokes this register in a manner that intimates intimacy. My reliance on a literature that positions eros or eroticism as fundamentally bound up with pedagogy insists that the potential of eros and desire, when held responsibly by pedagogue and student, can radically transform the pedagogical relation into one of self-knowledge and political agency; when not held responsibly, when the pornographic comes to replace the erotic in pedagogy, in this account the end is isolation, abjection and abuse. Secondly, I take my cue from a body of work that refuses to think apart South Africa’s arrested present from the psychic and affective damage done by apartheid. Lalu (2023:6) offers the injunction to which those pondering the intersections of the aesthetic and the pedagogical in post-apartheid South Africa need to respond.

‘We need a different kind of aesthetic education that prepares us for a post-apartheid future, an education that shapes desire in a certain way’. This injunction is motivated by his diagnosis: ‘The aftershocks of petty apartheid would be felt long after apartheid had been laid to rest, thwarting desire and bedevilling creativity wherever it left a trace’ (Lalu 2023:7). I insist on this reading because if we are still in the grip of apartheid thinking, of petty apartheid, then the ‘counter-attack upon desire’ apartheid operated can be displaced, reinvented pedagogically between the master and the disciple. What I have tried to show here is that pedagogy can also enact a counterattack upon desire, not sexual desire, but a desire for self-realisation, community and becoming through sound. In crossing the body, the erotic, the struggle for voice and self, power, knowledge, and desire, the pedagogical relation and Charles’s account in particular provide a site for grappling with questions of desire and the lingering shadow of apartheid thinking. This relation, then, I read as shedding light on the long shadow of apartheid thinking, in whose grip we are labouring for freedom, looking for pathways onto desiring differently.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to those who agreed to be interviewed for this ongoing project. Without their participation, this work would not be possible.

The author declares that they have no financial or personal relationships that may have inappropriately influenced them in writing this article.

C.V. is the sole author of this research article.

Ethical clearance to conduct this study was obtained from Stellenbosch University, Social, Behavioural and Educational Research Ethics Committee on 2 March 2023. The ethics approval number is REC: SBE-2023-27113.

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and are the product of professional research. They do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated institution, funder, agency, or that of the publisher. The author is responsible for this article’s results, findings, and content.

References

Footnotes

1. During our interview, Charles told me about the poem he wrote. He subsequently provided me with a copy. It is included here with his permission in altered form.

2. One notable exception published in English is Ramstedt (2023b) on emotional and sexual abuse.

3. For more on the influence of colonial pedagogical practices and apartheid thinking on South African musical thought and pedagogy, see Froneman and Muller (2020), Lucia (2007), Olwage (2005), Struwig (2024), Venter (2009) and Viljoen (2014).

4. For a discussion of the term that carries its racial baggage into debates about pure versus tainted music, see Venter (2018:281–282).

5. As a racial designation, ‘Coloured’ (capitalised) was attributed in apartheid South Africa to individuals deemed to be of mixed race. As social identity, ‘coloured’ has been reclaimed by many in post-apartheid South Africa. See, for example, Adhikari (2004:167–178). For an extensive consideration of coloured identity, including a longer history and contemporary perspectives, see the edited collection by Adhikari (2004).

6. Gallop’s book is a controversial one, published five years after she was accused of sexual harassment by a number of female students. See in this regard especially Amia Srinivasan’s incisive critique of Gallop’s approach to pedagogy (2021:123–124, 128–129).