Transgression

Chris Jenks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134516841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Transgression is truly a key idea for our time. Society is created by constraint and boundaries, but as our culture is increasingly subject to uncertainty and flux we find it more and more difficult to determine where those boundaries lie. In this fast moving study, Chris Jenks ranges widely over the history of ideas, the major theorists, and the significant moments in the formation of the idea of transgression. He looks at the definition of the social and its boundaries by Durkheim, Douglas and Freud, at the German tradition of Hegel and Nietzsche and the increasing preoccupation with transgression itself in Baudelaire, Bataille and Foucault. The second half of the book looks at transgression in action in the East End myth of the Kray twins, in Artaud's theatre of cruelty, the spectacle of the Situationists and Bakhtin's analysis of carnival. Finally Jenks extends his treatment of transgression to its own extremity.

1
Whither Transgression?

In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking.
Now, heaven knows,
Anything goes.

(Cole Porter)

History has determined a cruel backdrop for this book. I began writing in the late summer of 2001 in the wake of the American outrage. Four passenger aircraft had been hijacked by persons then unknown but subsequently revealed to be members of the al-Qaeda international terrorist organisation. Two of the planes had suffered accurate and catastrophic collision with the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one with the Pentagon building in Washington, and the fourth had crashed, upside down, presumed short of its actual target. The shock and tragedy rapidly transformed into anger and horror as the synchronicity of these events coalesced into causality. These happenings were purposive, they were deliberate and they were concerted. Thousands of people had been killed and this was an intended consequence.

Within a relatively short space of time there was a burgeoning and near global reaction. A violation had occurred, some line had been crossed. There was a growing consensus that a boundary, perhaps even a universal moral boundary, had been overstepped. Just as it was once voiced that there would be no more art or poetry after Auschwitz, September 11th began to slip into the language as a metaphor for irrevocability. Things would never be the same again. People across religions, across nations and across ideologies registered a grand transgression. Western politics now sought, strategically, to capitalise on existing alliances and to affirm new ones. The World (more or less) was to be at war with terrorism. Through this transformational cycle the social process moved to completion: the fracture gave rise to repair; the violation generated consolidation; the individual act of deviance summoned up a collective response. To transgress is to go beyond the bounds or limits set by a commandment or law or convention, it is to violate or infringe. But to transgress is also more than this, it is to announce and even laudate the commandment, the law or the convention. Transgression is a deeply reflexive act of denial and affirmation. Analytically, then, transgression serves as an extremely sensitive vector in assessing the scope, direction and compass of any social theory, as we shall see.

What then brought you to take this book down from the shelf, other than its cover or the never-to-be-repeated remaindered price? What is it about the idea of ‘transgression’ that captures the imagination? What resides in the word ‘transgression’ that reaches out, that magnetises, that touches the shadow side in us all? Is there perhaps some vicarious imaginative element involved – the supposition and fascination of sin; the desire to view through a glass darkly? It may be little more (nor less) than an interest in difference, an envy or disbelief in the excess of others, a knowledge of or desire for the niceness of naughtiness, a loathing, a prurience, a stalking mentality! Those of us cultured enough not to buy the Sunday tabloids but without the moral fibre to resist their headlines understand this zone of attraction and understand it also to be about margins and their relation to totalities.

An analysis of the concept ‘transgression’ will take us along a series of continua, both vertical and horizontal, such as sacred–profane; good –evil; normal–pathological; sane–mad; purity–danger; high–low; centre– periphery and so on. It is critical to realise that these continua can be understood and acted in relation to as if they were absolute, as if they were indices of stratification, and as if they were dichotomies. Indeed, for a lot of the people for a lot of the time this is exactly how they are understood. Such paradoxes contribute further to the complexity of the idea. Although always appearing to make reference to clear-cut distinctions transgressions are manifestly situation-specific and vary considerably across social space and through time. Our analysis of transgression will take us through a variety of empirical contexts such as crime, sexuality, ritual, carnival, art, culture and madness. The last is an informative metaphor:

The psychotic, alone in his cosmos, discovers a world he does not understand and cannot control. He adopts animistic ‘theories’ as a measure of self-defense. The necessity of primitive thought becomes clearer in this context. The psychotic is identical with a world that threatens him with indescribable torments.

(Ferguson 1990: 43)

Finally, this analysis will introduce a dramatis personae ranging from the recommended to the highly undesirable and comprising both theorists and practitioners.

It has become commonplace to regard contemporary society through the metaphor of excess. Inevitably such realisations address late capitalism in the West which is epitomised by its globalisation and its tendency to over-production – in line with our over-consumption. However, this kind of excess, excess as abundance, is not simply the topic of this book. What this work will address is conduct that goes beyond the limits; excessive behaviour or transgression. Transgression, then, is that conduct which breaks rules or exceeds boundaries. What is the character of the cultures that provide for this excessive behaviour and what are the contexts that provide for the appreciation or receptability of such behaviour? Is transgression merely a post-modern version of authentic or existential action? Is it the hyperbolic announcement of identity and difference in a society where identity and difference are paramount yet difficult to achieve?

The development of sociology confronted us with the problem of a new reality – that is, ‘SOCIETY’ as a thing to be studied, not just to take part in. Experientially, being in society is difficult enough, but as an object of understanding it has always presented inscrutable difficulties. What then is this thing called society?

For the greater part of the last century we were content to understand the social through conceptual vehicles like ‘order’, ‘systems’, and shared norms and values. Now, these devices served well and enabled us to sustain a feeble idea of society as being rather like the flat earth with a centre, a cohesive force and strict edges. We talked about normative conduct and deviant conduct (the latter being a weak-kneed version of the transgression that we shall address here). Increasingly it dawned on us that our simple model was unsupported by life itself. Society did not rest on an even base, there were folds and subterranean tendrils moving from part to part. The parts no longer interrelated so easily, there was no obvious harmony or agreement, but instead competition, difference and divergence.

We now had to resort to other devices like solidarity, culture and community to express pockets of agreement and to reaffirm our faith in the collective life. The discipline, having evolved in part through a competition between theoretical perspectives, shifted through a series of meta-paradigms which we regarded sequentially as the ‘linguistic turn’, the ‘reflexive turn’, the ‘cultural turn’ and the ‘visual turn’. This macro-conceptual evolution was not just one that was driven by an individual sense of intellectual purpose. The society itself was moving more and more rapidly and the Zeitgeist was shifting (or adapting) with equal acceleration. The Thatcherism of the 1980s pronounced the death of the social and cast human relations loose onto the vagaries of market forces; at the same time the academy erupted into the era of the post-, with post-history, post-feminism, post-colonialism, post-nationalism and, overarching them all, the spectre of the ‘postmodern’. Tangible metaphors of the social no longer seemed viable and our languages of order gave way to new geographies of social space, many of which appeared entirely cognitive. What remained, however, was a lingering, and real, sense of limits. Though diffuse and ill-defined, the limits, the margins, now took on a most important role in describing and defining the centre. Beyond the limits – be they classificatory, theoretical or even moral – there remained asociality or chaos, but ever more vivid and in greater proximity. Thus our new topic became the transgression that transcends the limits or forces through the boundaries.

Apart from the more obvious economic, technological and political changes that had brought our present circumstances into being there were also two grand philosophical moments that had predicted their moral consequences. First, the Enlightenment with its insistence on the ultimate perfectibility of human kind – a goal that was to be achieved by privileging calculative reason. And, second, Nietzsche’s announcement that ‘God is dead’.

Now, the Enlightenment ideal has meant three things: (1) that we have come to confuse change with progress; (2) that we have experimented with human excellence through various flawed political policies; and (3) that we have become intolerant if not incredulous towards excessive or transgressive behaviour. Nietzsche’s obituary for the Almighty, on the other hand, has given rise to three different but contributory processes: (1) it has removed certainty; (2) it has mainstreamed the re-evaluation of values; and (3) it has released control over infinity.

A quarter of a century ago we discussed ‘society’ as a reality with confidence; as recently as 1990 we considered ideas like a ‘common culture’ without caution. Today, in the wake of a series of debates, we cannot even pronounce such holisms without fear of intellectual reprisals on the basis of epistemological imperialism. ‘Identity politics’ has become a new currency with different, and increasingly minority, groups claiming a right to speak and equivalence of significance. Perpetually fresh questions are raised about the relationship between the core of social life and the periphery, the centre and the margins, identity and difference, the normal and the deviant, and the possible rules that could conceivably bind us into a collectivity.

Now these kinds of questions have always been raised but in liminal zones within the culture such as the avant garde, radical political movements (anarchism and situationism), and counter cultural traditions in creative practice (Surrealism). However, such questions have now moved from the liminal zones into the centre. Berman (1985) announced ‘all that which is solid melts into air’; we have all become aware that ‘the centre cannot hold’. An insecurity has entered into our consciousness, an insecurity concerning our relationships with others and concerning the ownership of our own desires. We are no longer sure on what basis we belong to another being.

Various forms of dependency – or, to put the matter less provocatively, trust – are fostered by the reconstruction of day-to-day life via abstract systems. Some such systems, in their global extensions, have created social influences which no one wholly controls and whose outcomes are in some part specifically unpredictable.

(Giddens 1991: 176)

This present state of uncertainty and flux within our culture raises fundamental questions concerning the categories of the normal and the pathological when applied to action or social institutions. Such periods of instability, as we are now experiencing, tend to test and force issues of authority and tradition – truth and surety are up for question. Clearly the 1960s provide another recent example of such a febrile epoch. The difference in the experience of today with that of the 1960s is that now we cannot commit readily to change because there exists no collective faith in an alternative to the existing cultural configuration – note the almost unremarkable transition from one government to another in the UK in 1997. It is hard to be militant in a culture where there is no consolidated belief in any collective form of action or collective identity; the political right appeals to outmoded ideas of ‘nation’ (symbolised through currency), and the left targets minority groupings to create temporary clusterings (note single-parent families). It would seem that instability and uncertainty are experienced today in peculiarly privatised forms that rarely extend beyond ourselves or our immediate circle. Far from a fear of freedom we now appear to espouse a fear of collectivity; we have become wary of seeking out commonality with others. The vociferous politics of our time are thus ‘identity politics’, and the response to dominant conditions is often poetic. There is a pathos in witnessing the temporary arousal of an aimless collective consciousness, and then only in the wake of the sad and untimely death of a dilettante princess – I refer to the extended public mourning of Diana in the UK in 1997.

It is only by having a strong sense of the ‘together’ that we can begin to understand and account for that which is outside, at the margins, or, indeed, that which defies the consensus. The contemporary rebel is left with neither utopianism nor nihilism, but rather loneliness. Time has already outstripped Camus and his wholly cognitive rebel:

Metaphysical rebellion is the means by which a man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation. It is metaphysical because it disputes the ends of man and creation. The slave protests against the condition of his state of slavery; the metaphysical rebel protests against the human condition in general. The rebel slave affirms that there is something in him which will not tolerate the manner in which his master treats him; the metaphysical rebel declares that he is frustrated by the universe. For both of them it is not only a problem of pure and simple negation. In fact in both cases we find an assessment of values in the name of which the rebel refuses to accept the condition in which he finds himself.

(Camus 1971: 29)

And also the inspirations of the Marquis de Sade, the grand libertine, who saw God as the great criminal and whose dedicated nihilism asserted that ‘vice and virtue comingle in the grave like everything else’. The possibility of breaking free from moral constraint in contemporary culture has become an intensely privatised project. As we recognise no bond we acknowledge fracture only with difficulty – how then do we become free-of or different-to? Such questioning provides the perfect moment to theorise the transgressive conduct that stems from such positionings.

Transgression is that which exceeds boundaries or exceeds limits. However, we need to affirm that human experience is the constant experience of limits, perhaps because of the absolute finitude of death; this is a point made forcefully by Bataille (1985). Constraint is a constant experience in our action, it needs to be to render us social. Interestingly enough, however, the limits to our experience and the taboos that police them are never simply imposed from the outside; rather, limits to behaviour are always personal responses to moral imperatives that stem from the inside. This means that any limit on conduct carries with it an intense relationship with the desire to transgress that limit. Simple societies expressed this clearly through mythology and more recent societies have celebrated this magnetic antipathy between order and excess through periodic ‘carnival’ and the idea of the ‘world turned upside down’, as Bakhtin demonstrates.

Let us say a few initial words about the complex nature of carnival laughter. It is, first of all, a festive laughter. Therefore it is not an individual reaction to some isolated comic event. Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants. The entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay relativity. Third, this laughter is ambivalent; it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. Such is the laughter of the carnival.

(Bakhtin 1968: 11–12)

Transgressive behaviour therefore does not deny limits or boundaries, rather it exceeds them and thus completes them. Every rule, limit, boundary or edge carries with it its own fracture, penetration or impulse to disobey. The transgression is a component of the rule. Seen in this way, excess is not an abhorration nor a luxury, it is rather a dynamic force in cultural reproduction – it prevents stagnation by breaking the rule and it ensures stability by reaffirming the rule. Transgression is not the same as disorder; it opens up chaos and reminds us of the necessity of order. But the problem remains. We need to know the collective order, to recognise the edges in order to transcend them.

This book, however, is not confined to issues of theoretical exposition and classification. The point of investigating transgression is to demonstrate its very real presence in contemporary life. The book rests on the view that a feature of modernity, accelerating into postmodernity, is the desire to transcend limits – limits that are physical, racial, aesthetic, sexual, national, legal and moral. The passage of modernity has been, as Nietzsche pointed out, a process of the oppression and compartmentalisation of the will. People have become fashioned in a restricted but, nevertheless, arbitrary way. Modernity has unintentionally generated an ungoverned desire to extend, exceed, or go beyond the margins of acceptability or normal performance. Transgression therefore becomes a primary postmodern topic and a responsible one.

This work will provide an interdisciplinary base, albeit composed by a sociologist, and an (anti)traditional approach to the concept of transgression. This will involve a history of ideas, a résumé of the major contributory theorists and a thematic discussion of significant moments and substantive concerns of these various debates. Although in large part the work will be theoretical in nature there will be whole sections that directly address and analyse substantive instances of transgressive conduct and investigate transgressive cultural productions.

Philosophical Origins of the Problem: Ethical or Logical?

Clearly a large part of our concerns in what follows will be definitional and we will address what constitutes a transgressional act. However, the meaning of an act does not reside solely within the intentionality of the actor, indeed, in most instances it resides within the context of the act’s reception. Phenomenological insights or the bedrock of what we now call social constructionism advise us that meaning is located within social situations. But we need to dig deeper than this: transgression cannot be understood through some transient indexicality. Though mediated through social and cultural manifestations such as taboo, convention and law, the roots of this particular problematic are to be found in more fundamental mindsets, be they moral or logical, which inform both cultures and societies themselves. Such Lebensfeld bear the status of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• The author
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Whither Transgression?
• 2 The Centre Cannot Hold
• 3 To Have Done With the Judgement of God
• 4 Excess
• 5 Extreme Seductiveness is at the Boundary of Horror
• 6 Journey to the End of the Night
• 7 The World Turned Upside Down
• 8 Theatres of Cruelty
• Bibliography