Hello all! This newsletter will consist of the transcript of this year’s birthday lecture. I am going to continue work on this project of 90s/Gen X intellectual history! Maybe try to pitch a… rigorous and theoretically-informed history monograph outside of the academy? What could I be thinking?! Don’t worry, there’s a little treat at the end. Enjoy!
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2023 Birthday Lecture: Towards an Intellectual History of Gen X, Part Two, Transgressive Boogaloo, or, What We Talk About When We Talk About Edginess
The intellectual history of Gen X… I thought I was out… but they pulled me back in!
I suppose it makes sense to begin a lecture on Generation X with a lame pop culture quote, doesn’t it? Especially when it’s a sequel! Last year, some of you were good enough to listen to me stumble through a half-written lecture attempting to grapple with the intellectual history of Gen X. The problem is, generational analysis is stupid. So, I had to spend a lot of that lecture defining my terms and my methodology, my effort to discuss the artifact of generation in a way that might yield worthwhile results. This ate up time and I couldn’t get to the meat of the intellectual history of Gen X the way I wanted to.. I felt honor-bound to return to it.
Like many decisions impelled by personal honor, this didn’t make a lot of sense. I make no claim to have really said the last word about Gen X, its intellectual history, or even the subset I will discuss tonight, the concepts of transgression and edginess. That would take at least one book, which, being a worker, I likely won’t have time to do. If Peterfest is essentially my yearly wedding reception to myself and my community of friends, these lectures are the introductions to the books I haven’t got the time, resources, or focus to write.
But- it shouldn’t be too hard to talk about Gen X and edginess, right? We all have opinions and examples to back them up, don’t we? I think it’s fair to say that a lot of Millennials have come to disappointment, frustration, or just amused incredulity at various antics we associate with qualities of the generation above us. So, I should have my choice of targets to dunk on. We’re all here for a good time, right?
Well, if Gen Xers quote bad movies, I, millennial, quote memes: A good time is what the other guys are for, the thinkpiece writers, the twitter posters. Wrong fucking deal. We’re here for a bad time. Let’s fucking go.
Let’s get some of the intellectual groundwork that I tried to create under us: first of all, generations are cultural constructs that are made, not born. Gen X is a perfect example of this. Grunge is considered iconically Gen X- nineties hip hop is not, despite being created largely by the same age cohort, at the same time, and having considerably greater staying power. David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen are considered Gen X writers, but few would describe Colson Whitehead or Jesmyn Ward that way except by default, despite their all coming from the same age cohort. The whiteness of the concept of Gen X is more than a “gotcha,” it’s instructional- cultural entrepreneurs of various kinds create generational constructs. The constructs do not meaningfully represent everyone born within a given set of years. This has been true for as long as the concept of generation has been with us, from back when it used to mean “members of the aristocracy who were young at the same time and so wrote each other letters and produced a vibe.”
To me, the most useful way to look at a generation is not as a concrete cohort but as a structure of feeling. This is a term introduced by the Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams in the mid-1960s to describe how material conditions express themselves in culture. Structures of feeling include both the actual transmission mechanisms of cultural information – everything from publishers to rumor networks – and the assumptions, ideologies, rhetorical boundaries and so on of the cultural conversation within a given space. The structure isn’t a structure in the sense of a building or even an institution- it’s a means of communication, a way of transmitting information and valuations. Ray Williams didn’t emphasize this, but I do- any given structure of feeling also necessarily devalues or even renders impossible the communication of some ideas. If you’ve ever tried to suggest to someone that they try reading something outside of their ambit, and you get a blank stare (or, in these days, more likely left on read before the group chat moves on), you’ve run into the ways in which a structure of feeling can inhibit communication, as well as enable it.
If Gen X is a structure of feeling, what is communicated within it? Bullshit, mostly. That’s by no means unique to Gen X, or even to generations, but I think that generational structures of feeling are a good place to hone the practice of critically understanding bullshit, which is part of what I call the vernacular history of ideas. Most intellectual history concerns itself with truths understood to be universal, or at least related to universal concerns and spoken in language meant to apply to the entire human community- however the speaker defines “human,” which might be narrowly. It is, whether its practitioners admit it or not, history of the sacred, and of the secular ideas that have taken the places of the sacred, propagated by people whose social roles are primarily to think and write about such ideas. A vernacular intellectual history takes seriously the creation and communication of ideas of the contingent, the particular, of ideas that attempt universality but do not reach it, or of ideas that have no pretense of being universal. Above all, vernacular intellectual history comes from those in some way outside of the main paths of idea-production of a given society. If standard intellectual history resembles canonical literary fiction, then vernacular intellectual history looks more like genre- scifi, crime fiction, horror. These lectures are exercises in vernacular intellectual history.
Here is where I leave what I had to say last year, with one more methodological caveat. By definition, unearthing the structure of feeling of a given generation, especially while that generation is still living (and posting!), means trying to hit a moving target. What Gen X, or any of the valuations assigned to it, or any of the concepts communicated within the Gen X structure of feeling, actually means changes over time. We view these changes through our own lenses, including, unavoidably, our own enmeshment in a different generational structure of feeling, and any lens introduces distortion. We can only hope to do our best to refine and adjust.
This is one reason why I am not leading with the dunks on Gen X cultural figures. The strand in the communicative mode that was Gen X that most stands out to myself and to many of my Millennial peers is the value attached to transgression of norms, mores, and taste- what we have come to call, most often pejoratively, “edginess.” Virtually the whole roll call of Gen X offenses against the ideas and sensibilities of the Millennials with whom I am ensconced, from Gen X participation in moral panics around cancel culture (and, more seriously, around trans existence), to the many catalogs of offenses against taste we can attribute to Gen X auteurs, to in some cases the open embrace of fascism by notable Gen Xers, can be attributed to real or perceived mismatches in the values placed on a wide variety of ideas and gestures related to transgression. I think this is just as true when Millennials (or, twenty years before them, Baby Boomers) dismiss Gen Xers as passive participants in oppressive systems as when Millennials are irked by this or that active Gen X transgression.
It is this system of valuations around the transgressive and edgy that I want to do a little bit to unearth here. I don’t think it’s as simple as “Gen Xers are edgy and Millennials are wholesome.” I think even as a high-level overview, that’s wrong. Even leaving aside how many people in both generations that description leaves out, it also doesn’t take into account what different groups mean when they are being transgressive or edgy, and what is meant to be communicated by them. What do we talk about when we talk about edginess? I want to know that, before getting into the dunking. The ideas of the dunk targets are bad enough to dunk on their own. Trying to build a picture of our history out of dunks isn’t going to fly. We’re here for a bad time, remember? Let’s dig down a little.
Let’s start out with the word “edgy.” The word itself seems to have started out describing physical objects- the sides of a table might be described as “edgy” if they hadn’t been smoothed out in the woodworking process. The use of “edgy” meaning tense, nervous, and irritable, where the edge in question is a sort of metaphorical edge of sanity or normal behavior, first appears in the mid-nineteenth century.
The tense and nervous usage shades into the usage we are used to, meaning transgressive, generally transgressive for the sake of it and in an obnoxious and affected way. Some of the uses I found when poking around various archives include city neighborhoods being called “edgy” during the period of black urban riots and uprisings in the 1960s. The writers meant to get across, I think, that these neighborhoods were tense, the residents nervous- but also keyed up, ready for action, not necessarily happy about whatever frightening or exciting events were going to happen, but not shying away from them, either.
We don’t really think of it this way now, but the element of the word “edgy” that connoted being troubled, being not quite well or in control of oneself, remained part of the word’s use for some time. You can see this most notably in discussions of “alternative” culture in the early and mid 1990s, which makes a certain degree of sense. It’s easy to forget now, but part of what “sold” grunge and alternative was the idea that its stars were, genuinely, unhappy, neurotic people, expressing themselves “authentically” through their music or other art. When you see references to a given musician or other artist as “edgy” in, say, Spin magazine in the early nineties, it’s not entirely a compliment, and it’s not an insult like we might use it. It means they think the subject, (a Layne Staley for example), as we might say today, “is not ok.” And when we think about the lives and deaths of a lot of alternative stars in that period, we know that many of them were not. The fact that seemingly everyone involved – the journalist, the reader, the star, the star’s managers and others making money off them – seemed to be passively waiting for this edginess to come to a breaking point, to go over the edge, and that this is exactly what happened with numerous major alternative culture figures, lends a sort of ghoulish credibility to that valence of the word.
This cuts against the depiction that Gen Xers who opine about generational differences make of themselves now, that they aren’t, and weren’t, emotional little snowflakes like us millennials. When you think about it, it’s pretty obvious that this line, spouted by Bret Easton Ellis among others, has never held water. The most iconic Gen X cultural figure has been understood since his suicide to have been someone whose depression and addiction crises stemmed in part from being too sensitive for this world. Immersing yourself, even briefly, in primary sources from the high tide of the alternative/grunge era shows you that Gen X was, indeed, very much “in its feelings.” I think it, and the rest of history, shows that it’s a mug’s game to try to denote any large group of people as more or less “emotional” than any other- but it is worthwhile to try to see what displays of public emotion were meant to communicate in different times and places.
Somewhere along the line – and it’s hard to say exactly when, but it looks to be around the eighties – “edgy” also acquired the connotation of “avant-garde,” which, in a geometrical sense at least makes sense: the avant-garde is meant to be at the forefront, which can be said to be the forward edge of something. It also worked for the convenience of those using “edgy” to sell cultural products. No one was going around interviewing people and describing them as “edgy” if all they were was chronically nervous and kind of a jerk. There had to be at least a pretense of cultural relevance, too.
What, then, was edginess meant to communicate, when we could talk about edginess as meaning, at one and the same time, transgressive, emotionally troublesome, and artistically avant-garde?
This isn’t an easy communication to extract and decode from the sludge of time and the hall of mirrors that is reception history, the reception of reception history, and so on. Think of a game of telephone played by people who have to wait a few weeks, or maybe years, to pass on what they heard to the next player, and also are playing in an active war zone. There’s never a single agreed upon definition of any of these terms – edgy, transgressive, even the definitions of the various generations at play, like Gen X or Boomers – at any given time.
For example, even as critics and journalists were using “edgy” as a relatively neutral descriptor, others in the cultural space understood it to be a meaningless marketing buzzword, as described by no less a nineties icon than MTV’s cartoon character, Daria- “As far as I can make out, edgy occurs when middlebrow, middle-aged profiteers are looking to suck the energy — not to mention the spending money — out of the ‘youth culture.’ So they come up with this fake concept of seeming to be dangerous when every move they make is the result of market research and a corporate master plan.” This was in an episode that aired in 1999, well past grunge’s heyday, but you can find earlier examples of skepticism towards the concept. We can make out patterns but there will always be counterexamples, reciprocal motions against the broader flow.
So, the normal practice of popular cultural history as practiced on podcasts and thinkpieces, where we identify some quote or definitional statement, stick it on a given bit of time, and say “at this time, they thought this thing,” won’t cut it, because the communications facilitated within a given structure of feeling take their meaning in reference to the rest of the communications within the system, even ones diametrically opposed. I see my job as trying to identify spaces of useful tension within these exchanges.
I found a biting point in literature and writing. The emergence of grunge and the use of “edgy” in this polyvalent way coincides with a heyday of self-consciously transgressive literary writing in the United States. Now, most of the writers published by Serpent’s Tail press or in 3 AM magazine would be profoundly insulted if you called them “edgy” - they likely would have understood the word the same way Daria did. But you can see in their work, and in the commentary made by the writers and editors who grouped them together into a loose milieu through journals and edited volumes, that some of the same valuations that in the early 90s defined edginess – emotional volatility, avant garde sensibility, and of course violation of norms – also runs through transgressive literature.
Arguably, transgressive is edgy with triple the syllables, edgy gone grad school. There’s some truth to that- there’s an overlap between the transgressive writers of the eighties and nineties and those applying then-fashionable European theory, ala Deleuze and Derrida, to popular culture at the time. Arguably, the writer from the transgressive school that gets the most attention nowadays is Kathy Acker, who wrote dozens of novels, plays, and poems between the early seventies and her premature death in 1995. And, to judge from the reactions when I refer to her in conversation about my research for this lecture, “the most attention” is very much a relative matter. Acker isn’t a household name, but is a name to conjure with in a few circles. Media theorist McKenzie Wark wrote a biography/memoirs/theoretical speculation about Acker, who was a lover of Wark’s in the nineties. Chris Kraus, author of the famous-ish theory-fiction “I Love Dick,” also wrote a biography of her (that’s two biographies by people who knew Acker personally, published within four years of each other!). Sarah Schulman, the novelist, playwright, historian, an activist with a history going back to ACT-UP who wrote “Conflict is Not Abuse,” has written that Acker’s death in 1995 represented a turning point for American literature, and not a good one- it helped signal the “gentrification of the mind” Schulman bemoans in one of her books.
I’m going to be honest: having read some Kathy Acker for this lecture, I both see what Schulman and others who draw inspiration from Acker mean, I think, and also do not share their enthusiasm. Among the transgressions that critics hail Acker for are transgressions against such mainstream, hegemonic notions as plot, character, and originality. To me, most of the Acker I’ve read seems like a recitation of random, mostly unpleasant events, with a certain degree of verve in the writing. Far as I’m concerned the best bits are the ones she lifts directly from other authors, which is something she did often, because those do have plots, characters, etc. Granted, Acker did this quite openly, and even had a nice little conversation in print with William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer, from which she drew extensively in at least one novel.
But for others, Acker’s pastiches, her violation of literary norms and consensus ideas of space, time, gender, race, morality, and the form of literature itself, felt, still do feel, like a liberation, a step forward. This is one thing that surprised me, when I started reading these collections of transgressive literature, and some of the novels by people in those collections. Whether or not they were to my taste, everyone involved who left a record – writers, editors, and reviewers – seem unanimous in seeing their work as liberatory, as rooted in an oppositional counterculture.
Whatever one wants to say about the oppositional, subcultural politics of the eighties and nineties – and I cut my teeth reading leftists critical of the whole Anglo-American left of that period for its devotion to “lifestyle politics” over more effective organizing – but a significant swath of the transgressive writers and artists of the period understood themselves to be engaged leftists. They might not have meant the same thing by that that people today do – among other things, this was a period where confusion between liberalism and the left ran deep – but we can’t lump them casually with where the politics of edginess landed by the 2010s, the province of South Park Republicans and Vice Magazine fascists.
The collections of transgressive literature that I read were dominated by writing about the experience of being marginalized, about being gay, lesbian, trans, or involved in kink (seemingly exclusively queer people involved in kink, if anyone’s keeping score), of being black, brown, or an immigrant, of being poor, of being disabled, of being a woman, of having AIDS. Moreover, the writers and editors understood all of this as important not just for the purposes of representation alone, but as part of breaking a Reagan-era silence on what mattered to people left behind by a social order that looked to be giving up on any pretense it ever had of freedom or justice. The AIDS crisis loomed especially large over transgressive literature, given how many of the participants involved were queer and how the disease, and the straight world’s callous indifference to it, decimated communities dedicated to the arts. Articulation of multiple, intersecting identities – queer, AIDS patient, student, immigrant, black, mother, intravenous drug user, etc. – and how those identities shaped movement needs and demands came part and parcel with the militancy of groups like ACT-UP, as well as the courage and organizing capacity it took to confront the FDA, the medical establishment, the Church, etc. We are starting to appreciate how important the AIDS movement and others around it were, how acknowledging their importance disrupts the story of a politically dull eighties and nineties, and it's possible to see that play out in the cultural sphere, as well.
All that, and the transgressive literature I read is seldom didactic. Most of it is pretty plainly confessional- here’s what it’s like to grow up a girl sexually interested in women in the Chicago suburbs in the sixties, here’s an account of being a queer person in the BDSM scene who has to leave New York for the Southwest due to money issues, exacerbated by the plague, etc. You get flights of fancy, some of them intentionally fantastic and others sounding like just very unlikely romantic, sexual, and lifestyle situations. Ironically, the closest thing to a really didactic take I saw came from the closest to an established transgressive literary figure, William S. Burroughs, in his sermon on how in the good old days, all the drugs were legal and people minded their own business, unlike later nark-happy eras.
But for the most parts, sermons these were not. Even as someone who grew up with the internet, there were a fair number of “whoa” moments at the extremity of what you can see in the transgressive literature… and some of it’s also just pretty good. You get extended scat sex play and fetishistic murder in Dennis Cooper’s tales of gay teens, and gleefully cartoonish depictions of apocalyptic racial violence in Darius James. Alongside that, you get real craft in both- real humanity, real humor, real pathos, even when the scenarios are intentionally absurd. For my money, Cooper’s depiction of aimless life and its hovering danger is leagues better than anything Bret Easton Ellis wrote in the same vein, and Darius James’ Negrophobia deserves to be classed with some of Ishmael Reed’s best work. And across the board in transgressive fiction, you also see unapologetic and respectful borrowing from genre fiction- scifi, crime, romance, adventure fiction, horror. You actually do see something like the breakdown of the wall between “literature” and genre that has been so often promised in these works. I was pleasantly surprised, seeking out the self-confessedly transgressive writers of the eighties and nineties. This is especially poignant given that the subject matter and aesthetics aren’t really mine- but I could see their worth.
Well… I was surprised by the transgressive writers, I think, because they didn’t win. They did not make themselves the dominant, or even an especially prominent alternative, artistic paradigm by the time I was paying attention in the twenty-first century. We are left with this culture, where the first thing I think of when I think “edgy” “transgressive” literature is… less any given work itself, and more the general impression that I am about to be handed a bad joke. How did we wind up here?
Let’s get two things out of the way first. Most of the writers I just talked about, as being prominent on the transgressive scene in the eighties and early nineties, were not, in fact, Gen Xers. Kathy Acker was born in 1947, Dennis Cooper in 1953, Darius James in 1954, Sarah Schulman in 1958, and David Wojnarowicz, a painter, writer, and activist who died of AIDS at age 37, was born in 1954. I think I can be forgiven for spending time on them in a lecture notionally dedicated to Gen X, given their contributions to the gestalt.
Second, the politics. It’s true that the politics of transgression were significantly more engaged and left-leaning than might be commonly assumed, based both on how “edgy” has become a byword for reactionary thought and on most leftist memory of the period. But we shouldn’t overcorrect. Kathy Acker and Dennis Cooper would be among the first to tell you that they weren’t, to use the then-inevitable word, “activists.” Cooper tells a story of a gay activist group sending him a death threat because they thought one of his books was homophobic! He tells it in a pretty amused register – it turned out, when he talked to the activists, that they hadn’t read the book, just a bad review – but still. At its most engaged, the transgressive writing I am giving some praise to here was a howl of fury against a world that was closing in on it. At its least – and, arguably, at the farthest limb of its artistic achievement – it tried to subvert and break down distinctions between right and wrong, true and false, effective and useless, which, say what you want about that artistically, probably is not helpful to political organizing. And they don’t have to be! As far as I’m concerned that’s not what art is for.
You could make an argument that transgressive art became more apolitical — sometimes swinging around to being frankly right-wing — as actual Gen Xers took the mantle from aging baby boomers like the ones I talk about above. It’s a simple argument but there is some credibility, here. Consider the list of Gen X edgy or transgressive writers: Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Tama Janowitz… and then who? Well, all those musicians, filmmakers, and tv writers, you could argue, and you wouldn’t be wrong- the grunge bands, Tarantino, Solondz, and arguably the most consequential of the lot, the cartoonists: Mike Judge, Trey Parker, and Matt Stone, who probably did more than anything to associate any sort of interest in the good of other people or of the world with being a lame scold, while also pushing the envelope in outre – and often hilarious – situations and language.
Arguably, the closest thing to a bridge figure between the transgressive culture of the eighties and the antisocial right-wing edginess of the twenty first century is a failed Broadway actor by the name of Jim Goad. Goad, along with his then-wife, published the zine Answer Me!, which saw four issues between 1991 and 1994, to substantial controversy and equally substantial critical acclaim. Zine culture had been around for some time, in a few different strains, and had become a fixture of “underground” culture due to its low barrier to entry in the days before household internet connections became common. Answer Me!, published between 1991 and 1994, became a crossover hit, garnering attention from a media establishment newly attuned to the odd, underground, and “edgy.” It helped that at least one issue was banned by the state of Oregon, where Answer Me! was published, due to content understood to promote sexual assault, the infamous Rape issue of the zine. The Goads won the inevitable first amendment lawsuit, and in general Answer Me! was a success because of its provocative content and hateful tone, rather than in spite of it. This was transgression culture shorn of whatever connection to a progressive politics it once had. The Goads weren’t rebelling to free anyone. They insisted that they hated the world, wanted to wallow in the most hateful aspects of the world they could find, and wanted you to pay them to watch them do it.
There had been, since at least the seventies and probably earlier, an underground scene of aficionados of what was called “hate literature,” often circulating in the same spaces where you’d find “extreme” music- punk, metal, industrial (it didn’t usually include outre or challenging music considered black, like hip hop). This hate literature consisted of a mixture of the sort of transgressive writing I was talking about, pornography, writing about murder, especially serial killings and mass killings in a register that wandered between clinical and admiring, and healthy dollops of pamphlets, cartoons and other agitprop put out by racist groups. It was often hard to tell who put these things together out of an interest in extreme expression, how many of them liked and agreed with the racism and violence involved, and in the scene itself, it seems to have been understood that it didn’t matter. What mattered was creative transgression both in terms of finding extreme content, and in presenting it in the novel forms that zine culture allowed- that last was what the scholars who examined the nascent form spent most of their time on. Arguably, Answer Me! was a condensation of the hate literature form, brought into something like the mainstream by a curious press and a rabidly self-promoting founder in the person of failed Broadway actor Jim Goad.
Those in the mainstream who praised Goad and Answer Me! cited his writing chops – we’ve all seen better writing in screenshots of 4chan posts, but there’s little accounting for taste – and his supposed authenticity. Much ink has been spilled on the authenticity politics of alternative culture, and I don’t have anything definitive to say about it. What I’ll say is, in Goad’s case, there were two main sources of this authenticity. The first is Goad’s tales of abuse at the hands of his parents, which served a dual purpose: showing he had a bad life thereby garnering sympathy and survivor credibility, and establishing his boundaries for being rednecks and/or white trash, the group he came to identify with. Goad came from an upper middle class background, was privately educated, graduated from Temple University and went on to take classes from legendary acting teacher Stella Adler as he failed to make it on Broadway, but, he could claim oppressed white trash bona fides by telling his stories of abuse, because his audience – made up mostly of young educated middle class white people like himself – accept the idea that abuse is something that happens to poor, uneducated people.
Essentially, Goad was doing redneck minstrelsy, degrading his subject, himself, his audience, and arguably the idea of culture as a whole to an audience thrilled by his, and their own, naughtiness. As the nineties wore on, he took his schtick into two directions that only a performer such as himself, high on the approval of hipster douchebags for his lame mugging (as well as on various drugs), would see as making sense. He left his wife Debbie, who frankly was the better writer of the pair, for a woman fifteen years his junior, after Debbie was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. He proceeded to physically beat the younger woman, in seeming imitation of his writings in praise for intimate partner abuse, often enough and flagrantly enough to get arrested and imprisoned for two and a half years. He also got more directly into politics, through his 1998 book Redneck Manifesto. If you want an ugly Gen X performance, there it is- take the worst, least fair right-wing stereotype of oppression olympics rhetoric, have a coked-out nineties zinester flip it so it’s white men who have it the worst – as long as they’re from a “working class” defined entirely by attitude and vibes – and you’ve got Redneck Manifesto. It sold well, and once he got out of prison Goad stayed in the white grievance provocateur lane for the rest of his career, where he is now a more or less openly bigoted gadfly in orbit around bigger figures in the online fascist world.
I’d love to tell you that this was a simple story of nice, left-leaning transgressive queer baby boomer writers getting their movement hijacked by mean apolitical or conservative edgy straight Gen Xers. But it isn’t. There was always considerable crossover between the strains that made Gen X edginess and the eighties transgressive culture- there’s a reason I spent so much time talking about these older writers, because in the end, they are impossible to separate from the younger edgy writers if we’re talking about what transgressive culture was and is.
There were extensive social and professional connections between the generations of edgy writers, and if I were better at that sort of thing I could make a little network chart with circles and lines and all that. My favorite artifact of that happens to come from Redneck Manifesto, the most interesting part of which is the acknowledgments. Goad thanks various edgy zinesters, the frontman from Pantera, the cartoonist who created the “happy merchant” antisemitic cartoon you might have seen online (also a cartoonist featured in Answer Me!), Rod Dreher back at an earlier point in his career, and also Jim Goad’s friends, which included Annalee Newitz, one of the founders of the scifi blog io9, a bastion of intentionally diverse and liberal-leaning scifi, and also comedy icon Patton Oswalt. We can take this as evidence for hypocrisy in contemporary liberal favorites, especially Oswalt, who praised Goad as recently as 2016. And maybe it is.
More interesting to me, though, than any revelation that a lib Gen X comedian has sketchy friends, is the core claim of the transgressive, which I think the evidence shows runs like a thread from Acker’s early novels in the seventies to the trolls of today, and binds the different strains together. Whatever else they look for in transgression, all treat it as a mode of arriving at truth, truth in some sense higher, or anyway rarer, than truth arrived at in other ways. Sometimes, this involves truth in a documentary sense- when pressed, this is what the serial killer fans, or documentarians of excessive music scene behavior would often make reference to.
More importantly, transgression or edginess is meant to establish, illuminate, or propagate a sort of existential truth. What these truths are vary, as does the sophistication of their articulation. One of the reasons someone like Kathy Acker is still known today is for her inventiveness in using empirical untruth – lies, fantasies, dreams, often intentionally incoherent – to arrive at an experiential truth, or of numerous ephemeral modes of discovering the fleeting truth of what it is to exist in a certain state of being, or between states. You see a range of satirical approaches – arguably, the sheer weight of satirical material produced in the last three decades of the twenty-first century devalued the concept of satire until it means nothing – involving holding up a distorted mirror to society and humanity, arriving at new truth through the interplay of reflection and distortion. In the middle of the sophistication range you see the idea that writing that transgresses on established norms of taste and morality uncover and bring to the light the experiences of those considered outside of the mainstream. When you scrape the bottom of the barrel, you come up with self-congratulatory contrarianism and cheap shock.
The contrasts between creators in the transgressive space, what they found in the transgressive and what they did with it, can be stark, as I think I’ve made clear in my comparative appreciations for the likes of Acker, Cooper, and James on the one hand and people like Goad on the other. Whatever the contrast, though, all of these strands exist within the same relationship to facets of the structure of feeling they lived in, those concerning the value of the transgression of social norms. Different strands- same tapestry, woven on the same loom.
That one of the popularizers of punk-inflected hipster fashion in the nineties and aughts also ended up the founder of a fascist paramilitary group that participated in one moderately serious attempt to violently overthrow a US presidential election – and that the initiation oath for his group involves pledging allegiance to suburbs, entrepreneurs, and housewives – is arguably where this telos was always going. The lowest common denominator of transgressive culture expressed itself in the form of Gavin McInnes, founder and editor of Vice Magazine and of the Proud Boys. It’s easy enough, if you so choose, to decide that the truth you will construct by going past what we deem socially acceptable is that you are an ubermensch and that you are allowed to stomp on those that you deem inferior or degenerate.
I suppose this is where I wrap up by saying that, to the extent there is sanity and a way forward for our society, it is the ways in which some of us, largely Millennials but aided by select elders the same way the transgressive writers came before the edgelords, abandoned transgression as a principle, adhered to empathy and the reality principle, and shifted the culture, right? Leaving edginess to our elders in Gen X — the ones who didn’t turn out to be cool in the end, like Steve Albini, Douglas Rushkoff, or the guy from Eve 6 — and the worst internet specimens?
Wrong… well, not entirely wrong. Things did change. Things always change- it’s just a question of how much, how fast, and in what ways. And yes, in general I think more serious attention paid to things like sexism, racism, the exploitative nature of capitalism, and environmental catastrophe is a good thing. What I disagree with is the notion that people born after the Gen Xers have some innate propensity for goodness or anti-oppression, or that they – we – broke the pattern that brought us where we are. We are in no position to call the game just yet.
Any structure of feeling expresses material conditions. It’s not an easy, one to one correlation. After all, if material conditions have changed since the heyday of the transgressive writers, or of the time when someone like McInnes could get major celebrities to be seen in public with him, they’ve mostly changed insofar as they’ve gotten worse. Inequality, concentrated control of resources, environmental degradation; all were concerns in the eighties and nineties, all are just even bigger concerns today. If transgressive culture came about in part due to those material conditions, presumably, the culture just would have gotten more that way as those trends deepened, right? How, then, would you have gotten a backlash against edginess like we’ve seen in the culture of educated millennials?
Well, we can say that transgressive/edgy culture never left us, as a brief look at the internet will tell you, and that’s true. And it’s not quite right that transgressive culture had the floor all to itself from the late seventies to the Obama period, either. Prominence doesn’t guarantee predominance. During the heyday of the transgressive, multiple movements arose challenging it, and not all of them were made up of tut-tutting religious squares. Arguably, the mainstream of Anglo literary fiction since 9/11 has been dominated by Gen X writers who resisted their version of transgressive culture: Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, and a man who died before 9/11 but whose posthumous influence has been great, David Foster Wallace. They didn’t call what they resisted transgressive, and indeed, all of their works have plenty of sex, drug use, and antisocial behavior. They tended to call for sincerity against irony- but it is my contention that they meant transgression culture, the kind that, at its most reductive — and the culture industry rewarded the most reductive versions — was basically an opposite-day reflection of contemporary social mores. Literary traditionalist Franzen later stood shoulder to shoulder or, anyway, tweet to post, to edgy, postmodern Bret Easton Ellis in denouncing millennial moralism in art, but that’s only to be expected for two aging literary moralists- and that’s what Ellis, for all his edginess, always was, a calvinist in postmodern drag.
The specific moral points might be different, but the Gen X sincerity artist and the Millennial squeecore twitter poster do something similar when they go to the well of morality as a definitional aspect of their art and criticism. Focused on the nuclear family or on anti-oppression, the dynamics of moralism in art have the same baseline morphology, just as both the highs and lows of artistic transgression share some essential traits. Just to complicate things further, it’s entirely possible to have a foot in both streams, the transgressive and the moralistic, as Ellis does. And the engine of nostalgia, if nothing else, ensures that someone will drag the transgressive – or the idealistic or moralistic! – out of the trash can for another go around every few years.
If the morphologies are so similar, maybe it’s because they respond to identical environmental pressures. The moralist and the transgressionist both seek sources of truth and legitimacy through positioning themselves relative to social codes. Our codes are so multifaceted that people often aren’t talking about the same things when they talk about transgressing and/or upholding them, but they get some kind of charge, and a model for the production of truth claims, from them nevertheless. Various pressures — the brownian motion of the cultural marketplace, the way changing technologies can help or hinder communications made in a given tone or register — exert themselves, but on anything like a long term, the fundamental dynamics prevail and tend to even these pressures out. It’s not right to say that transgressionist and moralist mirror each other. It’s a little more accurate to say that they depend on each other for definition. But what I want to get across is that both moralistic art and transgressive art have a similar repertoire of possibilities. Almost all of these possibilities take their meaning from the stance the artist has taken relative to their understanding of social mores.
This morphological similarity doesn’t invalidate all of the claims made for either transgressive or moralistic art. It does tend to discredit the idea put forward by partisans of both that their way represents what art actually is, what it should be. The transgressive version of this usually goes that transgressive art insists on the ontological independence of art, the old “art for arts sake,” therefore is more genuine than art with a moral or political intent. This was always wrong empirically, a cliche otherwise intelligent people used to avoid thinking something uncomfortable. Even those genuinely uninterested in art’s moral or political utility were usually forced to face its economic realities. But it’s also wrong given transgressive art’s imbrication in these structures of feeling and communication- without a social order or established morality to define itself against, what makes it transgressive? If it makes anyone feel better, there are similar easily disprovable claims on the moralistic side, many of them similarly exaggerating the universality of their ideas about art. We often see this in claims about the moral implications of producing or enjoying this or that cultural artifact.
Moralist and transgressionist within the space of arts have remain locked in this relationship for some time- for roughly as long as the fundamental social dynamic has been spiraling inequality and the replacement of more and more social systems with the logic of capitalism. Some people, most of them Gen Xers like Jim Goad or terrible historian Thaddeus Russell, try to define all of history as being made up of the struggle between moralists and the edgy! This is stupid. The relationship that we see between them is an artifact of our time- specifically, a long era that has seen endless, frantic variation in the cultural space, but little basic change to how things work, and most of what change we have seen is technological, and further entrenches the power of the powerful. It can’t be rightly said that the conflict between the moralistic and the edgy is fundamental to the structures that we live in- capital has its own logic, as does the biosphere.
We can learn about the strange, contingent life of the mind by looking at stories like that of Gen X transgression culture. Things like that interest me, in and of themselves. I understand they don’t interest everyone. That said, if we are to develop structures of feeling that are to communicate what we need to get across in order to express our demands and reach out to others in order to act on them, an understanding of how these things work is probably helpful. Reducing our understanding to one or another shallow narrative that takes conflicts in culture at face value – takes the clade of notorious bullshitters we dignify with the name “artists” at their word – won’t cut it. It’s true that material factors underlie these structures, but we can’t just punt to political economy either. You can’t fix a leaking roof or a termite infestation by repeating that a house needs a foundation.
On the other hand… It could very well be that actors with agendas orthogonal to the squirming, confused multi-generational donnybrook between the edgy and the moralistic will come along and knock the whole structure down. They might transgress along lines even Goad wouldn’t dream of, in the name of morals the purest of puriteens wouldn’t recognize, or, they could simply defy these categorizations in favor of some other scheme. This could be the way in which the fundamental dynamics that underlie the cultural reassert themselves. I will leave it to others to see who those actors might be, what their structures of feeling might communicate or leave unsaid.
Woof! What do you think, Mithra?!
So excellent--definitely monograph material.