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Having more or less lost this battle, as Nagel argues, new, successful modern conservatism, wittingly or no, adopted the mantle of transgression against cultural norms, as perhaps best exemplified by right-wing figures like Milo Yiannopoulos [1] or Gavin McInnes [2]. Although Nagel later talks about the 4chan rule “there are no girls on the internet” (not a formal rule of the site, but widely-enough adopted that it became a de-facto adage for 4chan and other sites like it), I feel she misses the intent there.
If I were to recommend anyone read it, I would only ever recommend they read my personal copy, scrawled as it is with notes in the margin, to hopefully better inform the reader and fill in the sometimes striking gaps in reasoning Nagel leaves unfinished. The book is surprisingly replete with typos, grammatical non-sequiturs and conspicuous absences of basic contextual information. She was taken aback by a recent headline about her book that read " Kill All Normies is about the alt-right but the left ends up looking worse". The nastiest alt-righters and heartless trolls are beyond communication, and so too are the most doctrinaire and cosseted ‘sour faced identitarians’.On the other side, a culture of struggle sessions and virtue signalling lurks behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. Jen has just completed a PhD thesis on the question of ideology and indeterminacy in Freud and Queer Theory. The culture of transgression they have produced liberates their conscience from having to take seriously the potential human cost of breaking the taboo against racial politics that has held since WWII.
Clearly, just “slipping up and ‘not getting’ subcultural conventions” is an unsatisfactory explanation for the abuse women face in these communities. Perhaps the most significant theorist of transgression Georges Bataille inherited his idea of sovereignty from de Sade, stressing self-determination over obedience. She then talks about how transgression became a virtue in culture more generally and goes on to tie this into a “culture war” that was generally lost by conservatives on this basis.As Lasch understood, for progressive politics anti-moral transgression has always been a bargain with the devil, because the case for equality is essentially a moral one. This is essentially the exact same thing that the culture which Nagel is criticizing is attempting to do — to recognize different identities as no less authentic. You may question the motivations of the right’s fixation on these relatively niche subcultures, but the liberal fixation on relatively niche sections of the new online right that emerged from small online subcultures is similar in scale — that is, the influence of Tumblr on shaping strange new political sensibilities is probably equally important to what emerged from rightist chan culture.
It became not only acceptable but fashionable to mock the straight, the white, the male, and the cisgender. The first thing to say is that any rebuke to Nagle is complicated by the difficulty of understanding her writing in the first place.But, Cashell wrote, on the value placed upon transgression in contemporary art: ‘In the pursuit of the irrational, art has become negative, nasty and nihilistic.
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