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There were 23 results from your search for keyword(s): 'Taboo'.
- "They've started again."
He refused to exchange the happiness of the day for her paranoia. He said quietly but firmly, "That's all old hat, the west is obsessed with al-Qaida now."
"Who funds al-Qaida? Who set it up?"
He stared at her and shook his head. "I don't want to hear this."
"It's the same strategy as always. Set up arms-length organizations, wait for terrorist outrages to create instability, panic, confusion. Move in behind the inevitable backlash...it's already started for Christ's sake!"
Source: Gladio: We Can Neither Confirm Nor Deny, p. 18 - After the Second World War, the growing social and cultural differentiation and pluralization of British society makes an analysis of the interaction between taboo and transgression infinitely more difficult. The abolition of institutional censorship in 1968 is just one symptom of a new permissive society which seems to accept an ever-increasing amount of transgressive behavior and its depiction in literature, art, and film. The Holocaust seems to be one of the few remaining taboos which cannot be transgressed through denial or other forms of showing disrespect without provoking public outrage or legal consequences. In such a climate of almost general permissiveness the role of literature as taboo-breaking force seems to have faded away, literature seems like a dog that is still able to bark, but has lost its bite. In other words, literature may stage transgressions more overtly than ever, but without any noticeable effect.
From chapter: Lars Heiler, Against Censorship: Literature, Transgression, and Taboo from a Diachronic Perspective
Source: Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, p. 66 - As some topics are in every society precluded from public or even private discussion, taboos are an important element of the collective system of repression. The social function of taboos has therefore to be considered as the stabilizing factor in social and cultural systems...Taboos indicate or represent social control, especially with regard to class, gender, and race, cultural hegemony, the norms and values of legal cultures, or they can express the attitudes and mentalities of subcultures and countercultures.
Basic conflicts over social norms and values that are taken for granted may then also be subverted or deconstructed by political groups. Thus, Quakers and other religious groups were confronted with "a ban on thought, a form of suppressing a set of political ideas and their utterance by means of censorship and other forms of political and legal repression" (Gurr, this volume), and this despite Milton or Bunyan daring to transgress censorship.
From chapter: Uwe Boker, Taboo and Transgression: A Socio-Historical and Socio-Cultural Perspective
Source: Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, p. 26 - Both temporally and geographically, the phenomena of taboo and transgression can be considered omnipresent, that is existent in all societies or cultures and at all times. If the ubiquity of taboos and their influence on social structures is generally accepted with regard to the past, which a narcissistic and supposedly enlightened present all too often views with condescension if not outright derision, what is remarkable is the fact that taboos not only continue to exist but that they can actually be said to be flourishing. A brief reference to the recent debates on political correctness, to shibboleths in relation to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, or to the ongoing question of how to deal with topics such as the Holocaust, should suffice to make this point clear. Specifically with reference to the British literary scene, one could, of course, also mention the more than thirty years of censorship imposed on D.H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, the uproar surrounding the staging of Howard Berton's The Romans in Britain and Edward Bond's Saved, or the outburst of violence following the publication of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, so brilliantly portrayed in Hanif Kureishi's novel The Black Album. Thus, even in modern or postmodern and supposedly enlightened Western societies, taboos are still pervasive, the controversies just mentioned being only the tip of the iceberg of an ongoing cultural struggle with, against and in favor of taboos; a struggle which, as the above examples demonstrate, is especially well reflected, documented and hard fought in literature and the arts.
From chapter: Stefan Horlacher, Taboo, Transgression, and Literature: An Introduction
Source: Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, p. 3 - But, more importantly, the arrested suspects had been under close police surveillance since 1989...As extensively documented by Robert Friedman in his article "The CIA's Jihad," the CIA's involvement with the World Trade Bombers "is far greater than previously known." The CIA campaigned to set up several jihad (holy war) offices across the United States. The most important was called Alkifah -- Arabic for "the struggle" -- and was established in Brooklyn where the sheik had settled. One of the visitors to Alkifah was a Green Beret from the US Special forces at Fort Bragg, Ali Mohammed. He came regularly from North Carolina to train the sheik's followers in the use of weapons, as well as tactical, reconnaissance, and survival techniques. The sheik's followers fought in a war that cost the United States $10 billion.
After examining the evidence it is hard not to conclude that "the CIA has inadvertently managed to do something that America's enemies have been unable to: give terrorism a foothold in the United States." [emphasis added]
Source: Terror and Taboo, p. 26-27 - In his paper, "Fearing Fictions," Kendall Walton proposes the notion of "quasi-fear" for that fright experienced when contemplating on a movie or TV screen agents (such as a terrible green slime or the creature from the Black Lagoon) that the viewer knows for certain are only fictional. Then there is the fear of a person afraid of a nonexistent ghost or burglar who are nonetheless "real" since the person believes that they are present. Fear of terrorism is never solely fictional, as in the first case, but is rather of the second type. Still, faced with the extraordinary fact that during one single month 10 million Americans decided to stay at home rather than take an airplane reportedly because of a terrorist threat issued several thousands miles away by a beleaguered dictator, one questions whether they were dissuaded by real feelings of terror or were engaging in some sort of make-believe in which they acted "as if" the threats posed real danger to their lives...
Terrorism discourse is characterized by the confusion of sign and context provoked by the deadly atrocity of apparently random acts, the impossibility of discriminating reality from make-believe, and text from reader. These strange processes and their mix make terrorism a queer phenomenon. Emptying the sign of its deadly messages seem to be, following Barthes's advice, the best antidote to the experience of terror. And nothing appears to be more damaging to the ghosts and myths of terrorism (for audience and actors alike) than fictionalizing them further to the point that fear dissolves into "as-if" terror.
The discourse's victory, then, derives from imposing a literal frame of "this is real war," "this is global threat," "this is total terror." Its defeat derives from writing "this is an as-if war," "this is an as-if global threat," "this is make-believe total terror."
Source: Terror and Taboo, p. 28-29 - In short, the very act of writing an ethnography of political violence outside of conventional terrorism discourse can become in itself a major act of transgression of the policy of tabooing the violent actors.
Source: Terror and Taboo, p. 62 - Literary texts explore the limits of language and playfully engage with the border to forbidden territories beyond the empire of the Symbolic Order.
From chapter: Anna-Margaretha Horatschek, 'Logicized' Taboo: Abjection in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda
Source: Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, p. 194 - Most literary texts dealing with taboos only make a topic of violating taboos -- they are not violating taboos themselves. In the process of narrativization, as Schaffers (25) argues, the event is processed for the cultural archives. As this transformation assimilates taboos to the discourse of the Symbolic Order and thereby domesticates them, the question arises: How do we recognize taboos, especially if they are unconscious to a large degree? For Kristeva [Julia Kristen, essay "Powers of Horror"], feelings of horror, fear or dread, disgust, revulsion, and nausea or physical reactions like vomiting, fainting, or trembling signal that the individual is confronted with the tabooed limits of those aspects of reality which his or her culture has circumscribed as 'normal', 'real', or 'true', and which are included in the semantic field of a cultural reality.
From chapter: Anna-Margaretha Horatschek, 'Logicized' Taboo: Abjection in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda
Source: Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, p. 195-196 - Recent developments in literary criticism and historiography have made it easier for us to assume that, rather than viewing fiction as the antithesis of fact, they share a porous boundary. A perspective closer to Vico's philosophy [e.g. mythology as the first science] would argue that there is a generic consciousness that combines both the literally true and the fictive; such a view regards "the true and the fabulous as simply different ways of signifying the relationship of the human consciousness to the world." Yet the discourse on terrorism is so traumatized by brutal events that any postulation of continuity between fact and fable regarding it may appear frivolously scandalous. Is the attempt to do so a denial of atrocity? Hardly. Nevertheless, to our minds the really challenging issues have more to do with the ways in which the popular media, scholarly treatises, and official reports employ narrative strategies to anticipate, relate, and interpret such events. Once having contemplated the horror of the mute fact, whether real or anticipated, it is essential to realize that its true impact, far beyond the shattered bodies or buildings, resonates in the halls of the collective imagination.
Source: Terror and Taboo, p. 10-11 - Since taboos are normally not the topic of open discussions but largely internalized, any form of critical questioning is realized, if at all, only through massive outside influence. Given literature's ability to constitute a discursive field in which even marginalized, aberrant voices can articulate themselves, to give voice to something which could be called 'the collective unconscious' and to transcend its time of origin, literature becomes an extraordinarily privileged medium for the depiction and analysis of phenomena such as taboo and transgression...From this in turn it follows that an approach that conceives of taboos only as social phenomena misses the point, that textual analyses need to pay attention to the strategies and the contents of symbolizations, and that aesthetic traditions need to be taken into consideration, such as, to give but one example, the modernist aesthetic of innovation which often depends on rupture and on violating taboos.
From chapter: Stefan Horlacher, Taboo, Transgression, and Literature: An Introduction
Source: Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, p. 16 - The political mockery of dismissing entire countries as "terrorists" or "terrorist sympathizers" -- by abolishing their long and rich histories, by debasing their languages, by stigmatizing their representatives, by sheer self-deception -- is premised on the intellectual banality of constructing a discourse around a word that inevitably imposes conceptual reification within a tabooed context.
Source: Terror and Taboo, p. 23-24 - The taboos that Gulliver's Travels breaks traverse whole areas of early eighteenth-century English society: the novel assails guiding principles of Enlightenment philosophy, absurdities of scientific progress, the rise of capitalism, Walpole's Whig government, party politics in general, religion, and the travel books that were fashionable at the time, but it does so in such oblique ways that eighteenth-century censors and modern critics alike are at a loss when trying to pin down the exact targets of the novel's satirical attacks. This is a quality that Gulliver's Travels shares with all good satires and results mainly from the fact that 'satire' does not constitute a fixed literary genre, but is able to occupy any genre parasitically and use these genres as hosts which it eats up from within. Therefore, modern satire theory has recognized the futility of trying to establish the generic boundaries of satire, but views satire as a "mode" (Connery and Combe 9) of writing, a "frame of mind" (Knight 7) and "an 'open' form" (Griffin 186).
From chapter: Lars Heiler, Against Censorship: Literature, Transgression, and Taboo from a Diachronic Perspective
Source: Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, p. 55-56 - The three primary agents of institutionalized social control in Britain, charged with supervising all kinds of religious, legal, moral or social actions have been the church, state and civil society...Thus, the authors of Sir Thomas More were told to leave "out the insurrection wholly and the cause ther off"...Representations of popular protest or references to popular unrest were considered to be taboo. Hence, the deposition in Shakespeare's Richard II failed to appear in the first printing.
From chapter: Uwe Boker, Taboo and Transgression: A Socio-Historical and Socio-Cultural Perspective
Source: Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, p. 27-28 - Transgression...is concerned with moving beyond a state where identities and concepts (i.e., race, class, gender, religion, nationality) are stabilized, well-defined, and petrified, toward a fluidity which serves as the basis for an implicitly ethical approach fusing aesthetic, epistemological, and practical aspects.
From chapter: Stefan Glomb, Revaluating Transgression in Ulysses.
Source: Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, p. 212 - We in Washington are accustomed to the petty scandals of Washington politics. However, there is another category of offenses, described by the French poet Andre Chenier as "les crimes puissants qui font trembler les lois," crimes so great that they make the laws themselves tremble.
[W]hen the Iran-Contra scandal exploded in 1986, both the Congress and the national mainstream media pulled up short. . . . The laws trembled at the prospect of a political trial that threatened to shatter the compact of trust between the rulers and the ruled, a compact that was the foundation upon which the very law itself rested.
The lesson was clear: accountability declines as the magnitude of the crime and the power of those charged increase.
Source: October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan, p. 226 - While experience and factual knowledge is not necessarily a precondition for a great work of art, terrorists who are the product of a fertile imagination alone are of greater interest to the student of literature than to the student of terrorism. Böll dealt primarily neither with the Meinhofs and Baaders nor with the innocent bystanders, but with the vague sympathizers, those affected by the anti-terrorist backlash, brutal police practices and a yellow press operating without inhibitions and conscience.
Source: The Age of Terrorism, p. 196-197 - [B]ear...in mind that, on the one hand, taboos can be functionalized by a society to strengthen its identity (cf. the scapegoat), that they can create security since they exclude objects, actions and persons viewed as threatening and thus produce, albeit ex negativo, a legal sphere in which certain topics are precluded from being openly discussed, but that, on the other hand, this function can also be interpreted as a highly effective means of social control, that is as a collective system of repression and negative conventions that draw borders and help secure authority along the temporally and culturally specific axes of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the impure...[T]he concept of taboo...can be understood as an arena of contestation in which a society negotiates not only its values and beliefs...but also its borders and power structures.
From chapter: Stefan Horlacher, Taboo, Transgression, and Literature: An Introduction
Source: Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, p. 13 - [During the Restoration] Whereas the family remained the quintessential unit of the private sphere and its boundaries could only be violated by official bodies in very special cases, public sites of discourse became the domains of "policing" by the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, which were broadly middle-class voluntary associations trying to promote civilized refinement, to change collective identities and to purge the public space of transgressive behavior.
From chapter: Uwe Boker, Taboo and Transgression: A Socio-Historical and Socio-Cultural Perspective
Source: Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, p. 31-32 - [I]t seems that the erosion of traditional norms has not shaped a society which is free from taboos, but one that has rather erected new taboos and orthodoxies which are linked with concepts such as female and gay emancipation, multiculturality, religious tolerance, and political correctness (which has itself developed into a form of moral censorship). The power of these taboos can be gauged by the euphemisms, careful phrasing, and self-censorship that (democratic) politicians revert to when they talk about the issues in question, which represent discursive minefields for anyone who openly challenges their validity. Transgressions of these new cultural taboos are usually performed by reactionary, anti-democratic, or anti-emancipatory social forces which oppose one or more of the values established by an open society and sometimes propagate authoritarian and totalitarian views of the world and of social interaction. Admittedly, the functions of literature in such a complex cultural force field are difficult to pin down.
From chapter: Lars Heiler, Against Censorship: Literature, Transgression, and Taboo from a Diachronic Perspective
Source: Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, p. 66 - [Quoting Valeri] A taboo usually marks some event or situation that is likely to threaten the integrity of the body as the seat of the integrity of the subject. But...this integrity of the subject may in turn depend on the integrity of a certain external object, as determined by the classificatory system at large. If the focus of interest of taboo, then, is ultimately the subject, it does not exclude -- indeed, it must include -- all classifications of objects that have any bearing on the subject...Thus pollution, although focussed on the subject, modelled on the body's permeability to external objects, and principally concerned with the substances and processes were this permeability is located, may stray very far from them. It may...become entangled with all kinds of medical and magical theories and practices where they exist. Furthermore, it may be used to enforce rules, to shore up or even express hierarchical relations, and so on.
From chapter: Stefan Horlacher, Taboo, Transgression, and Literature: An Introduction
Source: Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, p. 11 - [Regarding censorship-evading satire in Gulliver's Travels] Swift's masterstroke in order to negotiate between the Scylla of vague generalization and the Charybdis of blunt particularity was to merge both types of satire in such a way that they would both be constantly evoked by the text and that the reader would be unable to draw a neat line between them. Thus, Swift involves his readers in a satirical game of hide-and-seek in which they do not know exactly what to look for, or, if they have eventually found something are unable to tell if this was the object of their search in the first place. Equally, the censors were unable to tell if -- or where -- a transgression of taboos had happened.
From chapter: Lars Heiler, Against Censorship: Literature, Transgression, and Taboo from a Diachronic Perspective
Source: Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, p. 56-57 - [T]he still unbroken interest of a broad public in this...topic of taboo [is] paradoxical because the concept of taboo has become a taboo in itself, because taboo is generally accepted as drawing the fundamental borders between the sacred and the profane, whereas a critical glance shows that these borders can scarcely be drawn unproblematically, since not only the concept of taboo as such, but also the concept of the sacred turns out to be polysemic, if not aporetic. While in most civilized societies the use of violence is strongly tabooed, it nevertheless remains inherently if not inextricably bound up with the notion of taboo. This does not only hold true for the cultivating potential inherent to relinquishing drives, but, as Christoph Türcke argues, "above all for the fatuousness of a specific ban on thinking that individuals en masse subject themselves to in order to be able to endure a society they did not choose themselves and yet allow to remain as it is.".
From chapter: Stefan Horlacher, Taboo, Transgression, and Literature: An Introduction
Source: Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, p. 4-5
