Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

taking action. In other words, by banning the artist or censoring the artwork, the state
officially recognizes—or institutionalizes—the political value of transgression. To adopt
previous terminology, the cultural capital of the politically transgressive artwork is
established through a series of exchanges and negotiations between the state and the
work, the authorities and the artist.
Stallybrass et al. have tried to demonstrate how exchanges between established
polarized hierarchies such as the high and the low (the integration of pornography in high
art, for example) “carry political charge through aesthetic and moral polarities” (3-4).
Hence, shock and subversion, as they affect both the audience and the artistic canon, can
also have an impact on political discourses. After extensively discussing Bakhtin’s
notion of the “carnivalesque” as that transgression which purposely subverts the
established hierarchies of the high and the low as well as the Bataille-Foucauldian
perspective of the potentially liberating effects of transgression, Stallybrass et al. align
themselves with Jonathan Dollimore in arguing that “[i]t would be wrong to associate the
exhilarating sense of freedom which transgression affords with any necessary or
automatic political progressiveness” (201). Rather, they perceive the carnival—and the
transgressions associated with it—as a set of “symbolic practices” which only creates the
illusion of revolt, for the carnival always implies a “return” to established hierarchies and
in doing so, it systematically reinforces the hegemonic social order and affirms itself as
an ideological tool of control and dominion (13, 201). It is precisely the point that
Umberto Eco makes in Carnival! by arguing that the carnival is not a “pressure cooker”
but rather, it is a “safety valve,” where the accumulated anxieties of society’s conflicting
forces are safely released through the activities of the carnival.
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