Transgression, subversion

“Remember, and fear to transgress” (Milton, Paradise Lost, VI.1)

“Trespassers W”(“Tilos az Á”)

• The Piglet lived in a very grand house in the middle of a beech-tree, and the beech-tree was in the middle of the forest...Next to his house was a piece of broken board which had: "TRESPASSERS W" on it. When Christopher Robin asked the Piglet what it meant, he said it was his grandfather's name, and had been in the family for a long time. Christopher Robin said you couldn't be called Trespassers W, and Piglet said yes, you could, because his grandfather was, and it was short for Trespassers Will, which was short for Trespassers William. And his grandfather had had two names in case he lost one--Trespassers after an uncle, and William after Trespassers.

anthropological perspective

• Transgression in mythology, religion, politics• Pet theme of theory (Bataille, Deleuze, Kristeva)• Satan; Prometheus• Oedipus, Niobe • Man is circumsrcibed, curtailed, restricted• Greek idea of sophrosyne (lack of excess) • Curiosity: Pandora’s ‘box’ or jar

anthropological perspective

• Freud: to live in civilisation is to be unhappy • ‘Too legs good, four legs bad’ • the Law in The Island of Dr Moreau

law and desire

desire itself is not transgressive – it is generated by the law

• Romeo and Juliet; Tristran and Yseult • love feeds on prohibition (myth of passion vs

marriage)

Complicity of law and desire

• “The law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression” (Rom 4.15)

(nullum crimen sine legen) • Georges Bataille: „a profound complicity of

law and the violation of laws” • „a taboo is there in order to be violated”;

the story of the Fall • Rüdiger Safranski: A gonosz avagy a szabadság

drámája • Tree of knowledge (knowledge of good and

evil) like the sign ‘Ignore this sign’• It is ‘evil’ to eat the fruit of the knowledge of

good and evil

Complicity of law and transgression

• transgression „suspends the law without subverting it” (Bataille)

• Transgression reinforces the law

Anthropology of transgression

• Archaic societies: overregulated• Leviticus 11.5: “the rock hyrax, because it

chews the cud but does not have cloven hooves, is unclean to you”

• Modern societies: new forms of prohibitions, strict regimes (dieting)

The anthropology of transgression (Roger Caillois: Man and the Sacred)

(1) Sacred and profane: the basic division ʻsacred’ (sacer; Hebrew khadosh, Greek

temenos – ʻcut off’, ʻseparate’ (2) Every transgression is total and catastrophic

(all elements of the world interrelated by magic)

(3) Rules maintain the world - but they cannot renew it → feasts

Feast and transgression

• Creation ~ transgression • Chronos and Rhea: incest • “there is no order that is not founded on

crime” (Carlos Fuentes: Terra Nostra) • Feast: ritualised return to chaos and creation • Such transgression is also sacred

The ‘economy’ of trangression

• violating the rational logic of economy, of exchange based on eqiuvalence, give and take

• Non-productive expenditure: gift, sacrifice • POTLATCH: excessive giving away of precious

objects, gifts; humiliating the recipient• spectacular destruction of wealth • rivalry, fight for prestige; economy before money

and market

Gift ~ Christian agape

• The miracle of the fish • “Ha ugyanis olyasmit birtoklunk, ami nem

fogyatkozik meg az ajándékozás révén, akkor mindaddig, amíg nem adunk belőle másnak, nem úgy birtokoljuk, ahogyan birtokolnunk kellene.” (Szent Ágoston: A keresztény tanításról)

• Agape: irrational, absurd, unmotivated giving - waste

Transgression in modern society

• „any act of expressive behaviour which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values and norms, be they linguistic, literary or artistic, religious, social and political” (Barbara Babcock, qtd. in Jonathan Stallybrass and Allon White. The Politics and poetics of Transgression, 1986)

Experience of transgression

• mixture of pleasure and anguish: joy of doing sg illicit

• but also an anguish, anxiety about being in the wrong (sin, guilt)

(Susan Rubin Suleiman: Subversive Intent)

secular world

• Michel Foucault: „Profanation in a world which no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred is this not more or less what we may call transgression? In that zone which our culture affords for our gestures and speech, transgression prescribes … a way of recomposing the empty form of the sacred, its absence, through which it becomes all the more scintillating” („Preface to Transgression”)

Transgression in modern society

• (1) No transcendence, no beyond, no sacred (but the place/site of the sacred is reproduced)

• (2) politics rather than religion; prohibitions set up by power, law

• (3) subversion rather than transgression

transgression – subversion

• showing that prohibitions are not ʻnatural’ → can be transgressed

(Nietzsche’s critique of morality: The Genealogy of Morals)

“If transgression subverts, it is less in terms of immediate undermining or immediate gain, than in terms of the dangerous knowledge it brings with it, or produces, or which is produced in and by its containment in the cultural sphere.” (Jonathan Dollimore)

the subversion/containment controversy

• “Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.”

(Franz Kafka: The Zürau Aphorisms))

the subversion/containment controversy 2

• the impossibility of genuine transgression • (1) who will transgress or subvert? • Foucault: power is not just prohibitive but

productive: the subject is the product of power • the place of resistance becomes problematic: if I am

the product of power, how real is my resistance or act of transgression?

Transgression/containment

• Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four • O’Brien’s book (inditement of the Party) • Georges Balandier: „The supreme ruse of

power is to allow itself to be contested ritually in order to consolidate itself more effectively”

the subversion/containment controversy 3

• Transgression as the ruse of power• Marcelin Pleynet: „In our time, no more

transgression, no more subversion”, only „a parody of transgression, a parody of subversion, a simulacrum.”

• Jonathan Dollimore: „Resistance from the margins seems to be doomed to replicate internally the strategies, structures, and even the values of the dominant.”

Transgression/containment/4

• Transgression institutionalised, inflated • Mainstraim culture incorporates, defuses

transgression• Umberto Eco: “in a world of everlasting

transgression, nothing remains comic or carnivalesque, nothing can any longer become an object of parody, if not transgression itself”

Paradox of law and transgression

• culture founded on the impossibility of doing/saying everything

• Yet: there is nothing that cannot be done or said

The poetics of transgression

• „Language is a fascist” (Roland Barthes) (the ‘phrasé’) • „A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good

wit; how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward … words are very rascals” (Feste in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, III.1)

Transgression and literature

• Harold Whitehall: „Literature is nothing but organised violence on language”

• deviation, deviancy vs. ‘ordinary language’• poetic licence

Poetic licence• „descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during

the reign of Olaf Quimby II some legislation was passed in an attempt to put a stop to poetic exaggerations and introduce some honesty into reporting. Thus, if a legend said of a notable hero that ‘all men spoke of his prowess’ any bard who valued his life would add hastily ‘except for a couple of people in his home village who thought he was a liar, and quite a lot of other people who never really heard of him.’ Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements such as ‘his mighty steed was as fast as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three’, and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne.” (Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic)

decorum• „First follow NATURE, and your Judgment frame • By her just Standard, which is still the same; • Unerring NATURE, still divinely bright, • One clear, unchang’d, and Universal Light, • Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart, • At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art. [...]• Some, to whom Heav’n in wit has been profuse,• Want as much more to turn it to its use;• For Wit and Judgment often are at Strife, • Tho’ meant each other’s Aid, like Man and Wife.• ‘Tis more to guide than spur the Muse’s Steed, • Restrain his Fury than provoke his Speed; • The wing’d Courser, like a gen’rous Horse,• Shows most true Mettle when you check his Course.• Those RULES of old, discover’d not devised, • Are Nature still, but Nature methodiz’d: • Nature, like liberty, is but restrain’d• By the same laws which first herself ordain’d.• Just precepts thus from great examples giv’n, • [Greece] drew from them what they derived from Heav’n. • (Alexander Pope: An Essay on Criticism)

decorum

Pacta sunt servanda ‘cerulean’, ‘empyrean’

trope as deviation → higher truth • solecism • anacoluthon • aposiopesis • pleonasm

• Literary trangression: transgression of ‘literary’ rules

• (e.g. by drawing upon ordinary language (Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, 1798)

iambic pentameter

• „the oily smoothness of the usual five-foot iambic meter” (Bertolt Brecht)

• „to break the pentameter, that was the first heave” (Ezra Pound, Canto 81)

• (examples from Antony Easthope’s Poetry as Discourse)

• “Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. ...Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say? It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our species. ... But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come—” (Beckett: Waiting for Godot)

• „No one had plugged their leaking rectums with a wad of lint, or taped their eyelids shut, or tugged against their lower jaws to close their mouths. No one had cleaned their teeth or combed their hair.” (Jim Crace: Being Dead)

„No one had plugged their leaking rectums with A wad of lint, or taped their eyelids shut, Or tugged against their lower jaws to closeTheir mouths. No one had cleaned Their teeth or combed their hair.”

• „The waiting gull, a greater intellect, was too nervous of the bodies in the dunes to help itself, just yet, to any of their titbits on display, the wet and ragged centres of their wounds, the soft flesh of their inner legs, their eyes, the pink parts of their mouths.” (Jim Crace: Being Dead)

• „The waiting gull, a greater intellect, • Was too nervous of the bodies in the dunes • To help itself, just yet, to any of their titbits• On display, the wet and ragged centres of• Their wounds, the soft flesh of their inner legs, • Their eyes, the pink parts of their mouths.”