Violence, Society and Radical Theory

Bataille, Baudrillard and Contemporary Society

William Pawlett

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317001683
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Violence dans la société

Shedding light on the relationship between violence and contemporary society, this volume explores the distinctive but little-known theories of violence in the work of Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard, applying these to a range of violent events - events often labelled 'inexplicable' - in order to show how even the most extreme of acts can be seen as socially meaningful. The book offers an understanding of violence as fundamental to social relations and social organisation, departing from studies that focus on individual offenders and their psychological states to concentrate instead on the symbolic relations or exchanges between agents and between agents and the structures they find themselves inhabiting. Developing the notion of symbolic economies of violence to emphasise the volatility and ambivalence of social exchanges, Violence, Society and Radical Theory reveals the importance to our understanding of violence, of the relationship between the structural or systemic violence of consumer capitalist society and forms of 'counter-violence' which attack this system. A theoretically rich yet grounded expansion of that which can be considered meaningful or thinkable within sociological theory, this ground-breaking book will appeal to scholars and students of social and political theory and contemporary philosophy.

Chapter 1
Bataille, Baudrillard and the Theorisation of Violence

We should calmly ask ourselves, however, if the world we have conceived in accordance with reason is itself a viable and complete world (Bataille 1991a: 227).

[T]here is always an element of provocation in what I write (Baudrillard in Gane Ed. 1993: 153).

Introduction

‘Bataille’: reputedly a philosopher of eroticism, and ‘Baudrillard’: allegedly a postmodernist trickster and ironist - what can they tell us about an issue as serious as violence? A brief survey of critical writing on these thinkers might suggest that their ideas are playful, yet counter-productive, self-defeating or even blatantly irresponsible (Habermas 1984; Kellner 1989; Moore and Johnstone in Gane Ed. 1993: 152-5; Arppe 2009). My response to these assertions is simple - they are mistaken. Some of the main contentions of writers critical of, or even hostile to, Bataille and Baudrillard are examined briefly in Chapter 2; at this stage I want to offer a preliminary sense of why I think these two writers are important and how they invite a re-thinking of the relationship between violence and society.

Serious rather than playful, Bataille and Baudrillard are critical thinkers, this means that they develop ideas which are used to challenge accepted thinking on a wide range of subjects. Indeed, they are amongst the most critical of critical thinkers. Bataille and Baudrillard think and write in excess of critical thought, seeking to refine and re-sharpen what they see as the now blunted instruments of critical theory, particularly Marxism. Yet, even in their move to excessive or experimental modes, both thinkers certainly retain a direct relationship to the aims and aspirations of critical thought. The challenges Bataille and Baudrillard direct at accepted patterns of thought are fundamental and unrelenting. Neither argues for incremental changes or improvements to existing systems of social control, neither seeks to influence policy or political decision-making: their primary purpose is to defy the system, to weaken its hold on life and on thought, only when this hold is weakened can meaningful thoughts of reconstruction even begin. Their challenge is an uncompromising one. Both are influenced by the Marxist tradition of critical theory in that they seek a revolutionary transformation of existing social organisation as the only way to fundamentally improve social life. Yet both depart sharply from the Marxist tradition because they argue that Marxist theory itself shares in and supports many of the most damaging, life-negating and destructive tenets of the capitalist system. Principal amongst these is their shared ambition to shape social life according to the values of usefulness, instrumentality and economic exchange, values which, according to Bataille and Baudrillard, have resulted in a terrifying destruction of the environment and a reduction of life, human and animal, to instrumental slavery. Bataille and Baudrillard are both influenced deeply, though differently, by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche in that they argue passionately that life (not just human life, but all life) massively exceeds the narrow, calculative and constraining vision of economic production, whether conceived in capitalist or in communist terms. Life screams out beyond all limits: moral, economic, technological, and social; these systems constrain life, they destroy it but, inevitably, life pushes back at these limits, its pressure is unrelenting.

Both Bataille and Baudrillard attempt to develop a critical thinking that is more critical than Marxist thought. Both thinkers seek, in markedly different ways, to find new modes of critical thinking, new challenges to the hegemony of liberal-capitalist social organisation. In constantly developing new modes of theoretical contestation their projects become dazzling in scope, but also potentially baffling and have appeared to many readers to be eccentric and unworkable. For example, Bataille was apparently unafraid of the label ‘mystic’ - a charge that most critical thinkers would struggle violently to resist. Rather similarly, Baudrillard called his work Fatal Strategies (orig. 1983) “metaphysical” - a term which today connotes self-indulgent pretension and unverifiable musings and which any thinker who wishes to be taken seriously would normally avoid like the plague. However, even a slight acquaintance with their texts should reveal to any reader than the terms ‘mystic’ and ‘metaphysics’ respectively are being re-thought; indeed they are re-thought in ways which suggest that it is the self-satisfied mainstream of established ways of thinking which are actually built on versions of mysticism and metaphysics. In short, both thinkers are controversial and provocative, but not gratuitously so in that provocation is never the ultimate purpose or end of their thought. Both clearly desired to be understood and both offered something resembling a systematic body of thought, though a body of thought that insists upon irreducible excesses, remainders, losses and reversions within systems. With these prefatory remarks in mind, we turn to a brief biographical and intellectual introduction to the major ideas of Bataille and Baudrillard.

Georges Bataille (1897-1962)

Georges Bataille was born in Billom, Puy-de-Dôme, France in 1897 and was, in his own words, “of peasant stock” (Bataille 1989b: 217). He considered himself to have suffered an extremely painful and disturbed childhood, possibly including abuse by his father, yet it is unclear whether these events actually occurred or existed only in Bataille’s imagination (see Surya 2001: 14-5). In 1914 Bataille and his mother, fleeing the advancing German army, abandoned his blind and syphilitic father. This abandonment of a loved and hated, feared yet revered father seemed to have a decisive influence on Bataille’s thought and life, concerned as it is with violence, the sacred, loss, eroticism and death.

Bataille’s earliest intellectual interests were in medieval history, languages and religion. Formally converted to the Roman Catholic faith in 1914, Bataille seriously considered joining the priesthood. After spending several months with Benedictine monks at Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight in 1920, Bataille’s faith was exploded, seemingly due as much to sexual experiences as his avid reading of Nietzsche and Freud. Though no longer a Christian, Bataille’s intense religiosity was strengthened as he explored Gnosticism, Buddhism and various schools of mysticism. In 1922 Bataille graduated from the École des Chartres in Paris and became a fellow of the École des Hautes Études Hispaniques in Madrid. During this period, Bataille claimed to have witnessed the horrific death of a famous matador, Granero, whose skull was penetrated through the eye by a bull’s horns. This event fed into Bataille’s best-known fictional work The Story of the Eye (1928), indeed the inter-weaving fact and fiction, thought and life is a characteristic feature of Bataille’s work.

In 1929 Bataille co-founded the journal Documents which published articles on art history and social anthropology, including work by Marcel Mauss. He came into contact with Michel Leiris, the Surrealist ethnographer, and made the acquaintance of artists André Masson and Pablo Picasso. In 1932 he began attending Alexandre Kojeve’s influential lecture series on Hegel’s philosophy at the École pratique des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, also attended by Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan. Bataille developed complex personal relations with these two thinkers. Always hostile to Sartre’s existentialism, Bataille defended himself against Sartre’s critique of his 1943 text Inner Experience that had dubbed Bataille a ‘new mystic’. Details of a face-to-face spat between Sartre and Bataille are recorded in Bataille’s complete works, and elsewhere (Bataille 1992: 179-87; Bataille 2001: 40-74). In contrast, Bataille shared much common ground with Lacan. The two had become friends in the mid-1930s and Lacan was aware of, and may have attended, Acéphale sessions (see below). After the war Bataille attended and contributed to Lacan’s infamous seminars. Bataille’s estranged first wife, Sylvie, married Lacan in 1955, and Lacan raised a child fathered by Bataille as his own (see Botting and Wilson 2001: 79-87; Surya 2001: 53).

In 1936, confronted by the spectre of fascism spreading across Europe, Bataille set up a number of groups devoted to challenging capitalism, specifically its apparent tendency towards fascist rather than socialist revolution. These groups were not ‘political’ in the usual sense; they sought to explore the sacred, the forbidden or taboo, particularly the ability of the sacred to generate dynamic and strongly communifying social energies. In 1936 Bataille founded a secret society named Acéphale (Headless) made up of colleagues who would meet at a secret location, somewhere in the forest of Marly near Saint-Nom-la-Bretèche, outside Paris. Bataille and his colleagues performed collective rituals and experimented with meditation techniques in the hope that they might somehow stimulate new, intense senses of community not possible within the bureaucratic and technological confines of either capitalism or its (more) vicious twin, fascism. Bataille is known to have offered himself as a human sacrificial victim, and it seems hoped that the sociologist Roger Caillois, know for the severity of his temperament, would be willing to immolate him thereby marking the birth of a new community. Caillois, and all other members of the group, refused and, divided by internal tensions, Acéphale fell apart.

Running parallel with Acéphale was the short-lived College de Sociologie, operative from 1936-1939, and often seen as the theoretical wing of Acéphale. It also explored, though through a conventional lecture series, the volatile and ambivalent energies of the sacred, the ability of sacred rites and experiences to lift people out of their individual selves in an experience of awe, ecstasy or terror. The College examined the social effects on modernity of the apparent diminishment of the scope of the sacred, and also possibilities for re-activating the sacred as a political and social force. It is very important to emphasise that by the sacred Bataille meant something distinct from what is ordinarily referred to as religion. Religion, for Bataille, is the organised, hierarchised “betrayal” of the sacred, a weakening, domestication and narrowing the sacred’s energies. As ‘religion’ the sacred becomes tied to power structures, such as the priesthood, and is often forced to compromise with the goals and ideology of the State - as is the case with Christianity as a historical formation. The sacred, for Bataille, is an intense, contagious and ambivalent experience of awe, reverence, and terror unleashed when social boundaries - moral, physical and cognitive, are violently transgressed and the individual ego is overwhelmed. In modernity the profane sphere of life, that which is demarcated from the sacred and consists in economic production and political order, expands exponentially. The sacred is confined: though it might put in a brief appearance at weddings and funerals, it is no longer allowed to interrupt or suspend the flow of economic production. For example, today Sunday trading is no longer controversial and in an apparently ‘tolerant’ multicultural society such as the UK, workers are not given holidays for Diwali, Rosh Hashanah or Milad-Al-Nabi, to reference only the largest religious communities.

Bataille’s ultimate aim, during the period when the College was active, seems to have been the re-sacralising and so intensification of social relations through festivity and sacrificial ritual. The profane sphere would be strictly limited and periodically suspended by collective orgiastic festivities as the sacred was freed of the controls exerted by both economic values and by organised religions. Further, the dynamically re-sacralised community, Bataille argued, would be resistant to the part-rationalistic, part-charismatic nature of fascist leaders who had seized power, he suggests, by appealing to and channelling the desire for a lost or submerged sacred (Bataille 1985: 137-60). If the sacred could be unleashed fully, through open, communal means, Bataille hoped that the ideological perversion of myth and the sacred for Fascist ends could be finally destroyed, whereas it would live on permanently within capitalism as an unfulfilled desire. Bataille’s arguments on the nature of fascism are addressed in detail in Chapter 5 of this study. It is thought that Walter Benjamin attended some of the College’s sessions, and Marcel Mauss was aware of what his former students, Leiris and Caillois, had hatched with Bataille and is known to have strongly disapproved of what he saw as the mystical and anti-rational dimensions of the project (see Fournier 2006: 327). Others felt the project shared too much with Fascism, in its focus on sovereignty, power and virility, and condemned Bataille and Caillois as dangerously misguided (Sartre 1947; Habermas 1984; Tauchert 2008; Arppe 2009). I return to Bataille’s complex reading of the sacred and some of these critiques of his position in Chapter 2.

Bataille worked as a librarian at the Bibliothéque nationale in Paris from 1924 until 1942 when forced to retire through ill health. In 1946 Bataille founded the influential journal Critique, which published early work by Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot, and later he resumed his career as a librarian in Orléans while publishing systematic treatments of his major ideas, including the influential Eroticism, The Accursed Share and The Tears of Eros. He died of cerebral arteriosclerosis in Paris in 1962 after a long and debilitating illness.

General Economy

The purpose here is to present an accessible introduction to Bataille’s major ideas, as a foundation upon which the following discussions of violence will expand.

Bataille’s three volume study The Accursed Share elaborates his fundamental “laws of general economy”. The idea of general economy can be seen as linking all of Bataille’s themes and it formalises his approach to the relationship between violence, society and the sacred. The law of general economy has also been seen as a major weakness in Bataille’s thought, so it is very important to clarify this notion. Bataille states:

The living organism … ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g. an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically (Bataille 1988: 21).

Bataille’s basic contention is fairly straightforward: life exists in excess; it generally has at its command more energy, more ‘life force’, than is needed for simple subsistence. The accumulation of energy or resources (biological and social) cannot continue indefinitely, there must come a point when energy is consumed. The “accursed share” (la part maudite) of energy is the excess that cannot be expended usefully, the portion that overflows what is required for maintenance and growth. The accursed share, Bataille insists, can only be squandered or consumed unprofitably. For example, in human societies vast amounts of wealth and energy are squandered in festivity, in sacrifices, in play, in eroticism and in drunkenness. At the moment of death the energy that comprised and maintained life is, itself, squandered, lost without profit; death then can be regarded as ‘evidence’ of the operation of the accursed share in the general economy of life and death. In contrast, what Bataille terms ‘restricted’ economy confines itself to a circumscribed area or object of analysis, and seeks to accumulate knowledge in a supposedly unlimited fashion. Restricted economies, such as academic disciplines including sociology, criminology and economics, typically refuse to acknowledge their limits, their losses and their useless expenditures of energy. Further, restricted economies achieve some semblance of the orderly explanation of phenomena by expelling unmanageable objects and experiences, or by assimilating them through a rubric which is quite alien to them. For example, sociology has expelled sacrifice and the sacred (once major topics of concern, see Nisbet 1966) or has assimilated them under the notion of ‘culture’. ‘Culture’ is an inappropriate term because it is utilised to contain explosive, contagious and dynamogenic human practices within what is now a label for ‘safe’, inventoried, even ossified values -such as might be found in a school textbook or a Wikipedia entry. Bataille’s own examples of such exclusions include the dangerous notion of infinity banished from philosophy and the expulsion of zero from mathematics. I would argue that Bataille and Baudrillard are also ‘heterological’ objects that tend to be expelled from sociology, philosophy and cultural studies or are (very) partially assimilated through inappropriate and simplistic umbrella concepts such as ‘pornography’ in the former case and ‘postmodernism’ in the latter.

It has been argued by some of Bataille’s critics that activities involving the squander of energies are, actually, socially ‘useful’. This is because such activities provide rest, enjoyment or recreation so enabling people to return to work rejuvenated. Even death can be seen as a making way for younger and more vital beings to renew the species. This is indeed the case, but it misses the point. Bataille, drawing on studies by Mauss, directs our attention to the vital power of alternation between work and festivity in human societies: labour, production and growth can never be unlimited, there must be limits or boundaries which provide for the experience of release. However, Bataille adds two further arguments. Firstly, even from the perspective of restricted economies (such as sociology, economics, religious studies) it must be admitted that social festivities and expenditures include actions and experiences which far surpass or exceed social usefulness. For example, the destruction of resources, the flaring of violence and the consumption of large and disabling quantities of alcohol do not necessarily ‘rejuvenate’, they may prevent a return to work, or may even be the cause of fatalities. Nor can such excesses by dismissed as peripheral or accidental; indeed, such excessiveness is very widely understood as intrinsic or even obligatory to festivity: if people behaved sensibly and responsibly it simply would not be a festival. Secondly, if we shift the perspective in the direction of general economy it appears that work, production and utility are endured only because they provide the resources destined for expenditure, squander or sacrifice. Put in terms of Durkheimian sociology, such expenditures generate “social effervescence”: a palpable, bubbling excitement that binds people together, that draws them out of the realm of biological necessity or mere survival, out of the realm of individuality and creates a sense of a fuller and richer collective life. For Bataille, social effervescence or energy is the vital precondition for social organisation but such energies are not ‘useful’ until they are channelled, filtered and stabilised - until they become ‘culture’.

It is important to note that Bataille does not simply champion excess over utility, or sacrifice above production, that is, he does not simply invert the values of rationalist, utilitarian or economic thought. For Bataille, each is necessary: the system of production could not function without its periodic suspension, nor could wealth be expended sacrificially if it were not first accumulated. Further, the demarcation between the two spheres - sacred and profane, sacrificial and economic, heterogeneous and homogeneous - is vital for society because the marking of limits enables transgressive experience, such as festivity, to take place, as well as drawing the boundaries that construct and protect order. Without such limits there is neither order nor disorder. Restricted economies and the knowledge they generate are absolutely vital and indispensible for society and for thought. Yet, restricted economies cannot function without erecting limits and boundaries, and there will always be excesses and indeterminacies permeating these boundaries in any particular system; indeed the erection of a boundary or limit itself generates an ‘excess’ beyond that limit. Restricted economies ‘work’ only by drawing, selectively and discretely upon their ‘outside’ - the realm of general economy - and by simultaneously denying that they border an irreducible ‘outside’. The restricted economies of academic disciplines are generally happy to admit that they have limits, of a fuzzy sort, but assume that beyond ‘their’ limit another academic discipline picks up the baton. For example, sociology may defer to psychology and to biology where the functioning of the individual psyche or of the body are concerned. In concert, academic disciplines then purport to offer a seamless and limitless coverage of human experience.

Bataille’s contention is that there are irreducible excesses, excesses which must be expelled as a pre-condition for the scientific enterprise to begin. Science is, for Bataille, restricted by its underlying foundation in utility, all sciences must be of use to society. The accursed share, that which cannot be reduced to the utilitarian project of scientific thought, consists in paradox, anomaly, and in the failure to erect meaningful rather than simply useful foundations for knowledge, and also, for Bataille, in the subjective or inner experience of the thinker, their experiences of wonder, inspiration, mystery, despair and ecstasy. These experiences can never be formalised as scientific knowledge yet they are the source from which all scientific knowledge is generated; they are the non-foundations of the scientific enterprise.

Restricted economies then must be challenged, and challenged fundamentally. The restricted economies of academic disciplinary studies are generally unwilling to do this, as they devote themselves to protecting their borders, their internal coherence and, in today’s benighted world, their market share, research incomes and student recruitment levels.

Some further examples of the operation or effects of the accursed share: young animals squander excess energy in play, while sexually mature animals devote vast amounts of surplus energy to sexual behaviour. Sexual behaviour is particularly important to Bataille’s argument because sexual expression tends to exceed, in m...