The idea at the center of transgressive philosophy is simple and has unsettling consequences. It is that a limit cannot be understood from inside. A rule that is always obeyed is invisible; it feels like nature. Only when someone steps across it does the rule appear as a rule: a line that was drawn, by someone, at some time, for reasons that might be examined.
On this view the transgressor is not the enemy of the limit but its only real student. This essay sets out what that tradition claimed, follows it into the underground publishing of the late twentieth century, and asks what remains of it now that crossing lines has become an ordinary commercial activity.
The limit needs the crossing
The tradition begins from an observation about taboo. Societies surround certain things with prohibition: the dead, blood, sex, the sacred. The usual assumption is that prohibition and violation are opposites. The transgressive thinkers argued that they are partners.
Consider the festival. Many cultures set aside days on which the ordinary rules are suspended: servants give orders, the sacred is mocked, excess is compulsory. These are not failures of the system. They are part of it. The licensed violation discharges a pressure and, in doing so, confirms the rule for the rest of the year. A taboo that could never be broken would not be felt as a taboo at all.
From this came a stronger claim. The sacred, it was said, has two faces. One is pure, elevated and protective. The other is impure, dangerous and contagious, and it is no less sacred for that. What is forbidden is forbidden because it is charged. To cross the line is to make contact with something that ordinary, useful life is organized to keep at a distance.
Expenditure and the tyranny of the useful
A second strand concerns waste. Modern societies justify almost everything by its utility: work produces, saving accumulates, even leisure is defended as recovery for more work. The transgressive tradition replied that a society is better understood by what it squanders.
Every culture, on this account, produces a surplus that cannot be usefully absorbed, and it must be spent: in monuments, feasts, games, mourning, luxury and war. Sacrifice is the pure case. Something valuable is destroyed, and the destruction is the point. The modern refusal to admit this need, the insistence that every act should pay for itself, was held to be a kind of sickness. What cannot be spent gloriously will be spent catastrophically. The theory is set out at greater length in The Curse of the Sun.
Alongside this ran the notion of the limit-experience: an extreme of intensity, in ecstasy or anguish, at which the settled self comes apart and can be seen for the construction it is. The philosopher's task was to think from that edge rather than from the comfortable center.
The underground takes it literally
These ideas were developed in dense, allusive prose and were never meant as a program. In the 1980s and 1990s a certain kind of underground publisher treated them as one.
The characteristic product was the anthology of extremes. Between plain covers, with minimal commentary, such books assembled the testimony of murderers, the tracts of doomsday sects, the manifestos of solitary fanatics, accounts of bodily ordeal, and conspiracy theories of baroque completeness. The implied argument was the transgressive one. Respectable culture is defined by what it refuses to look at; therefore the truth about that culture is to be found in what it refuses. Collect the refuse and you have a portrait.
There was something in this. The anthologies preserved documents that no library would hold and no scholar then wished to read, and some of those documents have since become essential evidence for historians of religion and of fringe politics. Our own library exists in that lineage, and so does the more sober field guide to marginal religion kept in the next room.
Transgression aimed at people who are already on the floor is not transgression. It is conformity with a mean streak.
But the method had a flaw that its admirers were slow to admit. It could not tell the difference between revealing a limit and merely hurting someone. An editor who prints a killer's boasting beside a mystic's vision, and declines to comment on either, has not suspended judgment. He has made one: that the frisson is the point. Too much of the genre mistook cruelty for candor, and too many of its targets were people with no power at all. Transgression aimed at people who are already on the floor is not transgression. It is conformity with a mean streak.
The exhaustion of shock
The deeper problem was historical. Shock depends on a public that can be shocked, and on gatekeepers who will be outraged on its behalf. Both have been in short supply for some time.
An economy that discovers it can sell anything will sell the forbidden first. What had been passed hand to hand became a genre, then a marketing category, then a setting on a screen. The festival of misrule is now permanent, sponsored and searchable. When violation is available on demand, it no longer discharges anything and no longer confirms anything. It is simply more content.
This is the situation that defeats the old avant-garde. One cannot scandalize a culture whose official position is that it cannot be scandalized. How the art world learned to live with this, and then to sell it, is the subject of The Scandal Machine.
What it was for
It would be easy to conclude that the whole enterprise was adolescent, and some of it was. The better conclusion is that the tradition confused its method with its aim.
The aim was never to break rules for the pleasure of the noise. It was to make the maker of the rule visible: to show that what presents itself as natural, decent or simply obvious was decided, and could be decided otherwise. Crossing a line was one way of doing that, at a time when the lines were held by confident authorities. It is a poor way now.
A workable test survives. Ask of any transgressive act what limit it reveals, and who drew it. If there is an answer, the act may be doing the old work. If the only answer is that someone was upset, it is doing something else. By that test the honest heirs of the tradition are not the professional provocateurs. They are the people willing to cross the lines drawn by their own side: to say, among friends, the thing that the friends have agreed not to examine. That has always been the hardest limit to see, and it is as intact as ever.