MS: Nobson abounds in carnival, caricature and curious comic figures, all over the wall in Ah, for example, and on the great Egg. Carnival, festival, all sorts of pleasures that can “go too far”, comedy, laughter, mockery and satire, not taking things seriously, not sticking to form, to what is right and proper, are all experiences which threaten sense and order.
There have always been anxieties about this kind of thing. The likes of Plato attempted to gain an intellectual high ground by cleansing meaning of nonsense, by seeking a world of pure forms, eliminating what didn’t fit clean categories and tight logic. This involved despising what appeared to be out of place, grotesque, filthy, excessive, illogical and nonsensical, formless. City planners have been concerned to provide underground infrastructures, rules and regulations to control and contain waste and excess, to keep it private, hide it away. In Nobson however, this is all celebrated.
Heterology is concerned with this altogether other (heteros). It implies heterodoxy, opposing orthodoxy, not taking things seriously, and includes scatology as a very concrete and expressive variant. Scatology – laughter and dance, unproductive expenditures, embracing the excess of going too far, mocking the pompous idealism, an effort to think low, subversive, digging invisible tunnels underground that undermine the intellectual high ground.
See Dionysus