Author

Luke Beattie, The University of Notre Dame Australia

Transgression and its Practice: The Role of the Cultural Provocateur from the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century

Date of Award

2022

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (College of Arts and Science)

Schools and Centres

Arts & Sciences

First Supervisor

Doctor Ari Mattes

Second Supervisor

Associate Professor Camilla Nelson

Abstract

This thesis addresses the axiom that cultural provocation has lost its potential as a strategy of subversion due to the capacity of late capitalism – aka neoliberalism – to imbue any venture with profit-generating potential. In light of the tensions between economic exploitation in a digital consumer society and the transformative potential of subversive and transgressive art and performances, this thesis produces a “cognitive map” that reflects the current state of cultural provocation in the absence of an understandable social totality, reflective of the decentering affect and effects that constitutes late capitalism. In generating this cognitive map, the thesis examines transgressive artists, including Lenny Bruce, Andy Kaufman, Valerie Solanas, and Andy Warhol, who worked in continuity with a modernist tradition of transgressive art as social critique, pairing these comedians, writers, performers, filmmakers and visual artists with their “postmodern,” late capitalist counterparts, including Eric André, Nathan Fielder, Kathy Acker and Gaspar Noé. These cultural provocateurs are examined as symptomatic of theoretical strands of transgression that can be historically mapped against the modern/postmodern split, including Mikhail Bakhtin’s figure of the carnivalesque, Slavoj Žižek’s over-orthodoxy, the political-aesthetic provocations of The Situationist International, punk postmodernism, and Terry Eagleton’s notion of radical sacrifice. This thesis problematises the theoretical dogma that in postmodernism cultural provocation has lost its potency to be a transgressive force challenging its sociopolitical milieu through a close critical interrogation of transgression in a contemporary digital context, suggesting that, in the 21^st century, the answer to the question of “how can we transgress the limits of capital?” lies, perhaps, in accelerationism.

Publication Details

Beattie, L. (2022). Transgression and its Practice: The Role of the Cultural Provocateur from the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century [Doctor of Philosophy (College of Arts and Science)]. The University of Notre Dame Australia. https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/theses/435