Become your own Mom and Pop

I.  First example: The McCain/Palin campaign and the rebellious conservative

I want to step back a moment and talk about something that is absolutely untimely: the McCain/Palin presidential campaign of 2008. I began graduate school in fall of 2008, and to some degree this campaign has remained as an exemplary moment that refuses easy integration into my understanding of the world. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it, and you should be too. Because the McCain/Palin campaign was so wonderfully, frightfully weird. This is an actual weirdness that was undercut—effaced, even—by the weirdness that was the spectacle of Sarah Palin collapsing, rising, and collapsing again under the combined pressure of intense media scrutiny, the American Right’s fantasmatic investments in her as Republican messiah, and her own internal contradictions. This is not to say that Sarah Palin is not a total absurdity whose national narrative did for the American Success Story what Monty Python and the Holy Grail did for Arthurian legend. But in some way, these minor quirks of personal character (and McCain had his own) overshadow what was the truly absurd moment: the labeling of the entire campaign as “maverick.” The Republican Party wholly embraced this ridiculous title even though John McCain had been in Washington for over two decades, and even though their political platform was absolutely and terrifyingly conservative. It was not only conservative in that it was the American right-wing, but also in the more general sense that their movement wanted to conserve, to keep, to maintain, and to oppose progress. On the level of abstract political semantics, “maverick” came to oppose “change”; that was the choice in the 2008 election. The right-wing has come to assume not only the trappings of revolutionary rhetoric, but also sets itself up as the position of the unpopular, the transgressive, and the outsider. And this extends to the whole of the Tea Party movement. This is the weirdness. What are the conditions of possibility, what is the field of power and politics, such that the conservative and the transgressive can come to occupy the same position? What are the logics, figures, fantasies and transformations of sovereignty and authority in the United States today? This has, in some sense, been a nagging, gaping question buried always somewhere in the back of my mind.

These are not questions that can simply be answered through sociology or political science since it involves narrative, rhetoric and representation, which is to say that we are talking about fantasy, libidinal investment, and all the irrational ways in which we always fall short or stupidly exceed who we are and what we want. Certainly, these kinds of “harder” disciplines can offer some narratives about the campaign election and the phenomenon I am trying to describe. Most obviously, the “maverick” dimension of the 2008 campaign should certainly be seen as an attempt to distance the Republican Party from the wreck of the previous presidency. But while it is true that this kind of rhetoric played directly into the program of distancing the G.O.P. from G. W. Bush, this explanation doesn’t really answer the question of why this distanciation took this particular form. It’s pretty clear that something resonates about being an outsider, being unpopular, and standing in a position of exteriority in relation to the (imagined, fantasmatic) norms of the American public sphere. In what follows, I trace the gesture of transgression through post-war American literature in order to understand how the position of transgression functions in our contemporary biopolitical milieu. The object at the horizon of this analysis to keep in mind is the growth of a cultural ideal of rebellion and liberation, which is coupled with a denigration of traditional figures of authority. This ideal manifests itself in its most general form as an omnipresent suspicion towards more archaic loci of power such as the father, tradition, society and the state. The phenomenon I am trying to describe—the weirdness of the transgressive, outsider conservative—is a singular manifestation of a larger cultural configuration that I have decided to describe as the reification of the gesture of transgression. Literature is crucial for this question since transgression, the unpopular, and the position of the outsider as sites of fantasy and subjective transformation has been worked and reworked throughout the history of modern literature.

II. Second example: the stupendous, involuntary success of the avant-garde

Another interesting way to approach the larger question is to consider the life of the concept of the avant-garde. In “The Aporias of the Avant-Garde,” German critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger draws out the implications of the etymology of the avant-garde in order to critique its conceptual incoherence. The implicit militarism of the concept of the avant-garde assumes an enemy but—and for Enzensberger this is a crucial contradiction—its presumed enemy turns out to be (the conservative tendencies of) the very same body the avant-garde is purported to lead. By its own logic, the avant-garde winds back around and finds that “its only foe should be the tail of that very column it has the privilege of leading” (29). In literalizing this militant metaphor, Enzensberger discovers the paradoxical figure of the ouroboros; this movement folds martial aggression back around upon the very train in whose defense the avant-garde claims its right to war. For literary historian Matei Calinescu, who draws on Enzensberger while affirming a certain distance from his pessimism, this paradox vanishes if modernity is understood to contain within it two opposing dimensions: bourgeois modernity, which affirms science, progress, industrialization and time as a measurable object, and aesthetic (or cultural) modernity, which rejects the former through different modes, “from rebellion, anarchy, and apocalypticism to aristocratic self-exile” (42). As aesthetic modernity confronts the former, seen as a normative force or pressure that shapes modern subjectivity—a force or pressure which aesthetic modernity feels itself impelled to counter and impelled to explore its scope and limits—we can identify literature and other cultural products which takes up a self-consciously transgressive position as a critique of bourgeois norms. Nonetheless, Calinescu, following Enzenberger, notes that a certain shift has occurred in the concept of the avant-garde in the 1960s, popularized through the art-market and achieving what Calinescu describes as its “stupendous, involuntary success” (121). While the “success” of the avant-garde is attributed by these critics to the encroaching influence of the market upon cultural production, this commoditizing moment for me constitutes the question, rather than its answer. To use Calinescu’s terminology, this moment illuminates the fact that the critiques and self-critiques of aesthetic modernity and the materialism of the normative bourgeois subject can be reconciled; indeed, this coimbrication of the avant-garde and commodification forms a part of his discussion of the idea of “kitsch.” Transgression, in Calinescu’s analysis of the avant-garde, could be understood to be a form of modernity’s perpetual exploration of the limits of the subject. Both critics—and they are taken simply as examples of a fairly conventional image of the avant-garde—mark a certain moment when the concept of the avant-garde achieves a culturally dominant position. Again, the transgressive outsider position has become the new norm.

III. Transgression in postwar modernist literature

Towards the end of the end of the twentieth century, popular literary critic and host of KWBO’s “Booksworm” program Michael Silverblatt wrote an article that attempted to invent a genre of contemporary writing he called “trangressive fiction.” While this literary sub-genre—a preeminently marketable category, whatever his intentions—has failed historically to develop into anything interesting or substantial (it currently registers very little impact outside of a half-hearted Wikipedia page and a few asinine internet conversations), Silverblatt’s article is very interesting as a symptom of a larger cultural formation. That is, transgression has become itself a right, a good, a marketable category, outside of any commitments to concretely situated political struggle. Silverblatt’s article clearly stands as a cultural symptom that attests to the fact that the gesture of transgression has become absolutely desanitized and defanged (if it ever had fangs). The exhortation to transgress our social mandates has come to coincide with that mandate itself. While Silverblatt heralds this as a new genre, in some real sense this desire to transgress should be read an extension of certain tendencies of modernism rather than a substantial break from it. Michel Foucault locates the emergence of the literary imperative to transgress at the end of the eighteenth century, concomitant with the development of “a system of ownership for texts” (“What Is an Author?” 108). As literary discourse was now, with this authorship system, composed of objects rather than acts, the dimension of risk associated with the latter form of discourse (located on the “bipolar field of the sacred and profane, the licit and the illicit” [“Author” 108]) faded. In “What is an Author?,” Foucault only briefly notes that literature takes up the imperative to transgression as a way to reassert this danger and risk of discourse. In his “Preface to Trangression,” we can see the stakes of reassuming this risk: in the absence of God and transcendental limitlessness, human identity and interiority could only be experienced through the spiral co-dependence of limit and transgression. In the absence of the divine, the experience of limit and transgression replace totality and dialectics, and subsequently modern subjectivity can only know itself through that which exceeds (and—therefore—gives weight to) normative laws and demands. The paradox of transgression is clearly laid out early in the text: “The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows” (34).

It is with this coimbrication of transgression and limit that I have decided to use the concept of transgression as a way to frame this question. Rather than to prioritize the language of rebellion, resistance, liberation or contestation I want to use the language of transgression in part to harness transgression’s ambivalence towards power, politics and authority. While transgression can be linked to positive terms such as resistance or liberation, transgression also refers us to our irrational and reactionary fascination with the taboo, an attraction not necessarily tied to a revolutionary or progressive program. In the introduction to their study of transgression, symbolic inversion and the carnivalesque in bourgeois culture, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White are at pains to clarify that “there is no a priori revolutionary vector to carnival and transgression” (16). Writing against the tendency to ascribe to the Bakhtinian carnivalesque a form of utopian resistance, Stallybrass and White argue that the bourgeoisie’s transgressive exploration of its marginalized outsiders through the carnival is not necessarily an authentic embracement of these outsiders’ positions so much as an appropriation, in which “the very subjects which [the bourgeoisie] politically excludes becom[e] exotic costumes which it assumes” (200). In this study, Stallybrass and White show that the transgression of normative bourgeois identity through a dialogic engagement with its excluded others can serve merely to reinforce the very identity that this engagement supposedly transgresses. Following this tradition, while not being identical with it, postwar literature of transgression can be presented with a strongly moral program; for example, in Larry Kramer’s novel Faggots extended scenes of extreme sexual practices and rampant superficiality coincide with the exhortation to create a new gay identity that is less artificial and promiscuous, and more monogamous and loving. The narrative arc of the novel traces a development to a healthy homosexual subjectivity that must first traverse pathological fixations on stunted, impermanent love-objects--fixations produced and reproduced, of course, in a social field shaped by the homosexual sons’ primary rejection by their families and, beyond that, normative social organization. Kramer effectively mobilizes the logic of norm and transgression that Stallybrass and White identify in order to make visible the possibility of new norms and forms of subjectivity which resist being subsumed into monogamous heterosexual familialism or a gay community which would be simply an inversion of the former’s ideals.

Novels such as Faggots or Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem end in a clear moral program exhorting the creation of alternative normative ideals, and are therefore directed primarily towards the creation, continuation or transformation of a community ethos; as such they illustrate how the gesture of literary transgression can aim to create new forms of being that are fundamentally social. In these texts, the new normative sociality coincides with the revelation or the reanimation of kinship ties, whether condensed in Felice’s good-luck charm in Home to Harlem or explicitly acknowledged in Faggots’s Fred's final autogenic decision: “I must change myself. Be my own Mom and Pop” (362). More broadly speaking, the creation of new ideals comes about through the reinvigoration of what are perceived to be foundational or more archaic forms of sociality such as kinship, figuring liberation as a movement of return. Many texts that engage seriously with the question of transgression, then, find their poles of intelligibility within the modernist logic of decadence and primitivism. In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road the desire to escape the normative position of the “disillusioned” white man (170) manifests itself as an investment in a specifically racialized primitivism which redeploys of colonial tropes of racial otherness in its very attempt to identify with these racial others. While On the Road holds out the primitive other as the bearers of an authentic way of life, the novel itself highlights how this authenticity is forever foreclosed to the modern Western subject, figured through an impossibility of intercultural communication: “In their silence they were themselves” (284). We can see a different break here with the earlier literature of transgression that Stallybrass and White discuss. While On the Road also stages an engagement with the normative subject’s excluded others, it underscores the inherent impossibility of identifying with those who are excluded. While these texts are all concerned with the creation of new social ideals—a creation figured simultaneously as a return to more primitive or archaic ways of being—what the example of On the Road demonstrates is that the contestation of norms never takes place as a purely sovereign or autonomous gesture of creation. Instead, this contestation should be understood as a catachrestic entanglement with social and symbolic norms which must as such take up the preexisting sexualizing and racializing terms of biopolitical subject formation.

 IV. Interlude: Eminem ouroboros

The journey of Eminem’s music video “Without Me” replicates the narrative of transgression I am attempting to identify here. In some sense, the journey and its conclusion are radically at odds with one another in this video. Eminem’s travels through the (now somewhat dated) sea of popular culture occasions various aggressive and obscene forms of transgression: the insistent crotch in our faces, the superfluous violence against others and against the self, the cross-dressing homophobe, the obscenity of the King (Elvis) and the death of political authority in the figure of Cheney, the dressing up as Bin Laden in 2002, as well as the transformation of the island of Survivor—the island which could be understood to be itself the final trophy of the contest—literally turning into shit, with Eminem winning this contest through oral incorporation of this treasure/shit. On the other hand, the journey itself is occasioned by the decline of the parental authority, by the decrepit social order whose deficiencies Eminem takes upon himself to rectify. The grossest transgressions finally find their justification in the name of the most normative of social demands. That is, the travel through perverse partial drives is not even undertaken in the name of a healthy, adult genital sexuality, but in its most puritanical ideology and the most obviously superficial alibi: the innocence of the child, reproductive futurity. This music video is juvenile to the extent that juveniles are emphatically not adults; that is, the juvenile is still entirely enthralled by the parental authority figure, even as they pretend rebellion. This video should be read as an example that bridges the more literary texts I am discussing and the overt family values of the McCain/Palin campaign.

IV. Biopolitical reality and (neo)liberal governmentality

The underlying conceptual thread that I am concerned with in these examples is that the gesture of transgression is never in itself simply revolutionary, liberatory, excessive, or useless, but rather registers an orientation towards a primordial reality of the subject felt to be severed or lost. This is to say that the right to transgress normative social ideals in these works finds its grounding in the name of truth, such as in David Wojnarowicz’s memoir Close to the Knives, where the critique of the artificial “preinvented” “Other World” of language, property, boundaries, and lies is made through reference to an ontologically prior reality glimpsed through the capacity of the subject to “step[] back” (87-88). Similarly, in William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, the Interzone political party which seems to stand closest to Burroughs’s own position is called “Factualist” (151-153; cf. Ginsberg in the introduction, xxv), while the role of the author is figured mechanically as a pure “recording instrument” (200). This “recording,” is of course, to be differentiated from a naïve claim to an empirical reality of objects—Wojnarowicz singles out the term “nature” as a facet of the preinvented world (88)—as these texts emerge out of a background of a specifically biopolitical modernity which posits the truth of the subject as a product of an endless discursive interrogation of fantasy, desire, sexuality and subjectivity. Transgression and the biopolitical production of subjectivity find as their common foundation recalcitrant desires whose textual elaboration as the production of truth serves as a site of both disciplinary control as well as a resistance that troubles the limits of normality and abnormality. Above all, I wish to highlight how the gesture of transgression can find itself in very close proximity to the principle logic of liberal governmentality. In his The Birth of Biopolitics lectures, Foucault notes that the political rationality of liberalism does not ground itself in the principles of right—that is, in the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the sovereign—but rather in its knowledge of the nature of the objects of its action. A theory of sovereignty today cannot simply assume power to be the coercive expression of an authorized will (though this fantasy continues to haunt us) but must take into account a liberal governmentality as a form of biopolitics founded on a commitment to the truth of the objects/subjects of its governance. This is not, as the discussion above claims, a question simply of coercive power and heroic resistance. To ask whether Larry Kramer’s Faggots resists subsumption into biopolitical control (and the transformation of sexuality into discourse), for instance, obscures the real work it has done and continues to do as an intervention in the formation of gay community and identity. While it is certainly true that biopolitics and its production of subjectivity through the endless confession of desire supports coercive, exclusionary, and even deadly institutions of discipline and normalization, it would be naïve to assume that resistance to these specific institutions is tantamount to resisting the overall regime of intelligibility that forms their foundation. I certainly do not want to foreclose the possibility of other forms of power/knowledge which do not play out according to this biopolitical logic. I simply want to note that American politics today—progressive and reactionary—finds itself defined by this field.

Works cited/referenced:

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, and Postmodernism

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “The Aporias of the Avant-Garde”

Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression.”

-----“What is an Author?”

-----The Birth of Biopolitics

-----History of Sexuality, Vol. 1

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Larry Kramer, Faggots

Claude McKay, Home to Harlem

Michael Silverblatt, “Who Are These Writers and Why Do They Want to Hurt Us?: The New Fiction of Transgression”

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression

David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives 

PS. I apologize for the Eminem.