Disgust

The gooey and sticky need no names; the foul smelling needs no analysis and defies analysis. The disgusting allows us no distance from reality. It is a threat that gets at ya with an intensity no pleasurable thing can.

         

Winfried Menninghaus, author of the book Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, traces the literary, as well as philosophical history of disgust and its connections to an aesthetic of ugly.

 

For Freud, Menninghaus writes, “disgust is the direct opposite of a simple natural given (2).”

  A cultures reaction to disgust is not conditioned only by biology but by a conceptual framework. For Freud disgust is a symptom of the repression of sexual desire. For one disgust sustains the family structure. Disgust is part of a system of libidinous checks. It works to limit sexual activity in exchange for labor and productivity. Because of this the sexual drive must overcome the disgust taboos placed on the body, and sex becomes perverse activity. Yet this only works to intensify the pleasure and relegates pleasure to a private experience.

 

 

Perversity, disgust, and pleasure all converge. Freud’s theory sets up the collusion of disgust and pleasure. And this becomes a central problem to an aesthetic of ugly. When a viewer takes pleasure in the representation of something ugly how can this be accounted for? And how is one to take its moral imperative seriously if one enjoys the work not for its moral rightness but for its physicality? It would mean either rethinking the divide between pleasure and morality, or rethinking the moral imperative in works of art that are tough and brutal like the ones we’ve been talking about Dubeffet and Goya.

           

For Nietzsche disgust is connected to the sexual as well. The Dionysian is the true bestial nature of the amoral human. One of Nietzsche aphorism was “We reevaluate disgust (9).”

Before Nietzsche Kant would describe ekel (disgust) as a positive value meant to instruct. Disgust was useful in teaching a culture what was appropriate and what was not. However, this was also a way of insureing class division and racial seperation. If the poor and the foreign could be “proven”to be aesthetically disgusting then power could be stabilized.

 

Disgust was a means towards developing cultured, refined, tastes and high standards. Nietzsche came to see these refined moral standards, reinforced by notions of disgust, as false morals. Disgust needed to be reevaluated so that what was disgusting was no longer viewed as negative and marginal but as essential and truthful.

           

In much of the discourse that Menninghaus traces disgust acts as either positive or negative but always as an experience that transcends or contaminates the symbolic order for unmediated experience.

 

In Both Neitzsche and Freud disgust is antisocial and against the status quo. The disgusting is tied to the sexually liberating and therefore to pleasure.

 

The confluence of pleasure from the ugly becomes a problem for an aesthetic of ugly that chooses the ugly and despicable for reasons of moral outrage.

 

Menninghaus, Winfried Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation

State University of New York Press, Albany NY 2003.