(the) American (Novel of)

152 Shannon Winnubst
the political nihilism that results all too easily from it, the vague sense
that aesthetics is the singular realm beyond the grasp of utility persists.
Grappling with the seeming impossibility of thinking or living without
utility, we most easily turn to aesthetics. “What is not useful?” After
much searching, we comfort ourselves with the discovery of “style,
aesthetics, art.” This is, after all, surely what Nietzsche had in mind
when he beckoned us to turn away from the grave seriousness of
morality towards art, “where the lie is sanctified.” 1 Is not the sanctifying
of the lie, the undermining of the grand epistemologies of truth, not
also an evading of utility, modernity’s most forceful form of truth?
It is a tempting solution, with radical possibilities. But perhaps also
too obvious and simple. As Michel Foucault’s method, if not his explicit
response, demonstrates, this valorizing of the aesthetic as the realm
exempted from the powerful barometer of utility may itself be an
enactment of utility’s power. Indeed, as Georges Bataille argues over and
over, utility may not be so easily eluded.
Foucault repeatedly demonstrates the subtle mechanisms of boundary
construction and controlled transgression performed in the emergence
of categories. In volume one of The History of Sexuality, for
example, he shows over and over how a normalizing category emerges
through the careful construction of what lies beyond it. As an exemplar
perhaps, heterosexuality emerges as a category of identity only against
the emergence of homosexuality, the category of (apparent) transgression
that finally serves to reinscribe the heterosexual as the norm.
Bataille outlines similar functions in volume 2 of The Accursed Share,
where he shows how behaviors are eroticized via prohibitions, demonstrating
again how the transgression of set boundaries reenforces the
category transgressed. For Bataille (following Levi-Strauss), the exemplar
is incest, where the prohibition against intergenerational sexual
contact within biological families actually serves to eroticize familial ties,
ensuring the continued flow of erotic energy in this otherwise closed
container. And finally, in more recent texts, Judith Butler helps to open
the field of queer theory by using these strategies to show how the grasp
of the sex/gender distinction in feminist theory effectively controls the
kinds of transgressions against the normative heterosexual matrix, limiting
it to homosexuality rather than trans- or bi- or multisexualities. In all of
these texts, we learn to read categories as performative entities that, in
delimiting their own boundaries, ensure that the transgression of the
category will only further solidify the category.