ABSTRACT
It’s hard, these days, to feel outrage. When the Argentinian army took possession of South Georgia and the Falkland Islands, many people felt that it was outrageous, but I think too that they were consoled to discover that they could still feel this emotion. Mary Whitehouse has made a public life for herself by specializing in outrage; not so much by collecting instances of the outrageous as by alerting herself to the sense of it, keeping it going when it would otherwise have lapsed; as it has lapsed in most people. The plain fact is that bourgeois society can accommodate nearly anything. I should say, incidentally, that I use the word ‘bourgeois’ as a neutral term and often a term of praise, though one is supposed to use it nowadays only for irony or contempt. To me a bourgeois liberal is one who bases his liberalism upon a commitment to the values of a family man, anxious to secure a decent future for his children. A bourgeois society approves these values and regards the occasions on which they are defeated as regrettable. A bourgeois criticism of art likes to report that images which seem wild or bizarre are not really different from the ordinary images with which we are familiar. Such criticism likes to take part in ‘the rapid domestication of the outrageous’ which Leo Steinberg has named as the most typical feature of contemporary artistic life.
