The Politics of Edgelordism

It seems to me that, like so much else, "edgelordism" has a politics.

Consider what it means to be an edgelord--to go about provoking people for the sake of provocation. This seems to fairly obviously entail pleasure in an exercise of power over others, and using it to subject them to unpleasantness, that has more than a whiff of the bully about it. This is probably more dissonant for a person espousing the egalitarian values of the left than a person of the anti-egalitarian right.

Meanwhile there is the matter of whom one provokes. It may not always be clear just in which direction someone is punching when they make a provocative statement or perform a provocative act, but inclination apart, they are unlikely to get away with it for long if they offend persons more powerful than themselves. Those who offend for the sake of offending--if they get to do it for long--are probably managing to go on doing so because they take the safer course, making sure to stay on the good side of the former, not just by not directing punches at them, but directing punches at those they dislike (as bullies necessarily do).

Consider, for instance, the country's pieties. As James Galbraith remarked, "one cannot use in public" the word "market . . . without bending a knee and making the sign of the cross." But how many of our edgelords make the market their target? Quite the contrary, I remember how in the episode "Gnomes" the "edgy" creators of South Park made their "shock" ending their siding with Big Business against the mom-and-pop shop--and thus did it go with their sneering at rainforest-protecting environmentalists, and those who criticized the way in which the presidential election of 2000 was decided, and much, much else, so continually taking right-wing positions that some wondered if they were being ironic, and eventually realized they weren't.

The combination of politically conservative politics with a delight in obscenity that would be expected to offend a conservative seemed to them incongruous enough to media-watchers that they coined the term "South Park conservative." Yet "edginess" and conservatism have often gone hand in hand, as any look at a list of literary classics makes clear. The "èpater the bourgeoisie" Decadents are more easily classed with anti-rationalist reactionaries than with any progressive element (in contrast with, for instance, an Emile Zola, who offended in a different way for different reasons). Likewise Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange--all on the Modern Library's list of the Top 100 English-language novels of their century--are all at bottom deeply right-wing works that were edgy in that way, with what Nabokov had to say of his intentions in writing his book in "On a Book Entitled Lolita" making clear that in at least his case edgelordism was a motivation. The result is that rather than an innovator South Park stands in a long tradition, shock at which bespeaks nothing so much as the fact that our designated cultural commentators generally do not read books--or understand books when they do, none of which prevents them from being on the big platforms and getting the big money for being there in that way that makes fools of all those who snivel about the word of letters being a "meritocracy," such that we ought to be awed by its officially designated leaders and respectful of their opinions.