“The chthonian triumphs in Medea, as in the later Bacchae. The plays are symmetrical: citizenship is denied to a sexually ambiguous magic-working alien, who vengefully debases and liquidates society’s arrogant hierarchs.” Through their deviance, the outside world must come to re-reckon with their morality and norms. This re-reckoning re-opens the space of possibility, allows newness and change, keeps the structure limber and flexible
I get that mediocre metis can beat solid episteme, but the high-level play has always seemed to me in favor of a stable main structure that’s limber and flexible and accommodating enough of transgression within itself, realizes this limberness is in the interests of not just its longterm stability but its longterm growth. If we’re being generous with 70s/80s Paglia this is probably something like her overarching view: Alterity provides not just a shelter for misfits but equally importantly, a means of continuously interrogating and improving the main structure—the main structure providing both the stakes and the premises of interrogation (the premise for response).
I mean I'm starting to see how there are distinct cultures between the orthodoxy and the negorthoxy. I think it just might have to do with where the line is drawn, not in terms of where capitalism meets its subsumption limits, but in terms of where the reigning orthodoxy draws limits of what is acceptable within the parameters of the mainstream culture. So in a sense, deplorable culture would be the counter culture, insofar as it actually stands outside the parameters of the orthodoxy.I think the idea of inside/outside is pretty key to subculture stuff. I think we should probably just taboo the word "counterculture"; it implies a mainstream, and we don't really have that anymore.
The Melancholy of Subculture Society
Internet links small groups, helping dissolve big groups; good, bad? But a bit sad.www.gwern.net
Crazy - I've just been reading about this sort of stuff in the context of the Eleusinian Mysteries.This is the structure of so much classical work it makes my head spin. See Pentheus, teenage boyruler in Bacchae, trying desperately to contain his heterosexuality while his mother and her lesbian bakkhai horde tear him limb from limb in the forest