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Critical Sociology
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DOI: 10.1177/0896920514526624 published online 30 May 2014
Crit Sociol
Ishay Landa
Bataille: The Master, the Slave, and Consumption
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Bataille: The Master, the Slave,
and Consumption
Ishay Landa
The Open University, IsraelAbstract
The aim of the essay is to situate Bataille’s idiosyncratic thought on consumption in the context of the modern debate on this topic, to unravel its vacillations and contradictions, and to tease out its main implications. The modern philosophical and ideological debate on consumption, while highly variegated, can be usefully divided into two main camps, two broad intellectual traditions or lineages, a Marxist and a Nietzschean one. These camps are diametrically opposed in all important respects, including consumption, yet paradoxically enough, Bataille had roots in both. This point is of crucial importance for understanding his position and its striking peculiarities. Bataille’s contradictory political position is explored, a position which overtly embraces radicalism but remains in fact profoundly attached, it is argued, to capitalism.
Keywords
political theory, sociology, consumption, capitalism, communism, Bataille, Nietzsche, Marx
Introduction
The aim of this intervention is to situate Georges Bataille’s idiosyncratic thought on consumption in the context of the modern debate on this topic, to unravel its vacillations and contradictions, and to tease out its main implications. The modern philosophical and ideological debate on con-sumption, while highly variegated, can be usefully divided into two main camps, two broad intel-lectual traditions or lineages, a Marxist and a Nietzschean one. These camps are diametrically opposed in all important respects, including consumption, yet paradoxically enough, Bataille had
roots in both. This point is of crucial importance for understanding his position and its striking
peculiarities.
Corresponding author:
Ishay Landa, Department of History, Philosophy and Judaic Studies, The Open University of Israel, The Dorothy de Rothschild Campus, 1 University Road, P.O. Box 808, Raanana 43107, Israel.
Email: ishayla@openu.ac.il
The Dialectic of Consumption between the Master and the Slave
As a first step, we need to lay out, with necessary brevity, the main positions in the debate. Karl Marx was a powerful critic of modern consumption, but in a dialectical sense. Contrary to the widespread notions of Marx as a forerunner of the Frankfurt School critique of a reified culture under capitalism, Marx in fact affirmed the expansion of needs brought about by capitalist industry. He considered it a civilizing influence, and saw this as a marked improvement over past modes of production, attaining a better social and cultural stage: ‘The greater the extent to which historic needs – needs created by production itself, social needs … are posited as necessary, the higher the level to which real wealth has become developed’ (Marx, 1993: 527). Capitalism, which Marx (1993: 421) referred to as ‘the living contradiction’, was characterized, on the one hand, by the drive to press down wages and to restrict the workers’ consumption. Yet to this, utterly oppressive side, which aspires to reduce modern workers to slaves or machines, Marx saw dialectically wed-ded another drive, which enhances the worker’s consumption. And here he identified precisely the redeeming feature of the capitalist mode of production. The reason for this play of pressing con-sumption down while simultaneously pushing it up, is not any moral ambivalence on the capitalist part, a Dr Jekyll side to its social character which struggles with a sinister counterpart. Capitalism is Mr. Hyde entirely, governed by the self-seeking urge to expand at all costs. Yet this urge pre-cisely forces it, regardless of its subjective intentions, to play a civilizing part. The key here is the fact that the worker assumes a double identity vis-a-vis capital: in the factory she is a laborer, but in the marketplace – a consumer. Ideally, and contradictorily, each capital thus wishes to press down the wages of its own workers, while seeing the wages of all the other workers, which it con-fronts as consumers, increase:
[E]ach capitalist does demand that his workers should save, but only his own, because they stand towards him as workers; but by no means the remaining world of workers, for these stand towards him as consumers. In spite of all ‘pious’ speeches he therefore searches for means to spur them on to consumption, to give his wares new charms, to inspire them with new needs by constant chatter etc. It is precisely this side of the relation of capital and labour, which is an essential civilizing moment, and on which the historic justification, but also the contemporary power of capital rests. (1993: 287)
Far from accusing capitalism of stimulating mass consumption, Marx demanded that such
con-sumption be upgraded, expanded beyond the artificial limits set by the capitalist mode of
produc-tion. Unlike many of his 20th-century disciples, Marx charged capitalism not with plunging humanity into a reckless materialistic frenzy, but rather with inhibiting a genuine material
emanci-pation. In the third volume of Capital Marx (1991: 352) ascertained that, under capitalism,
‘soci-ety’s power of consumption is determined neither by the absolute power of production nor by the absolute power of consumption but rather by the power of consumption within a given framework of antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduce the consumption of the vast majority of society to a minimum level, only capable of varying within more or less narrow limits.’ Here Marx
identified both the possibility and the need for a superior socioeconomic order, arising out of
capi-talism, but transcending its limits, in which mass consumption will be expanded. After ‘the aboli-tion of the capitalist mode of producaboli-tion,’ Marx assumed (1991: 986–987), ‘the part regularly consumed by the direct producers would not remain confined to its present minimum level.’ Put in
20th-century terms, the problem was not the creation of a consumer society but the failure to do so.
Capitalism is a society in which mass consumption is in thrall to profit extraction.1
revolt of the elite against the materialistic values of the mass: the pursuit of comfort, plenty, ease
are all derided, denigrated. The tendency in general is to condemn the mass fixation with things,
with material benefits, at the expense of what truly counts: spiritual values, art, Kultur and Geist,
self-expression and individual achievement, risk, danger, thrill, and – occasionally thrown into the bargain in the leftish variant of the argument – better human relations.
The defining parameters were set by Friedrich Nietzsche in his seminal satire on the looming prospect of consumer society – again to use the term anachronistically – which for him would signify the dystopian reign of ‘the Last Man.’ Instead of leading humanity to new cultural summits, the progress of modernity unfolds the dismal vista of the dwarfing of humanity, a social and eco-nomic leveling down, the formation of a mass society at the heart of which stands ‘the most con-temptible man: and that is the Last Man’, a dreary, pitiful, middling, herd animal: ‘Nobody grows rich or poor anymore: both are too much of a burden. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both are
too much of a burden. No herdsman and one herd’ (Nietzsche, 1969: 45–46).2 Egalitarian mass
consumerism was at the center of Nietzsche’s critique: the Last Man may be pathetic to those who behold him from the outside, from a purportedly higher, would-be aristocratic vantage point. Yet he is subjectively a happy, contented fellow, indulging himself on puny material and carnal pleas-ures, and enjoying strife-free and easy going social relationships: ‘“We have discovered happi-ness,” say the Last Men and blink … They still work, for work is entertainment. But they take care the entertainment does not exhaust them.’ His needs may be trifling but, as even Zarathustra must concede, they are satisfied well and abundantly: ‘They have their little pleasure for the day and their little pleasure for the night: but they respect health. “We have discovered happiness,” say the Last Men and blink’ (Nietzsche, 1969: 46–47).
The Last Man is thus a caricature of the modern, mass consumer. Yet this is, noticeably, a por-trait of the consumer shorn of any distinctive capitalistic qualities: there are no inequalities of income and buying power worth speaking of; there is by definition no ‘conspicuous consumption’ underlining the buyer’s status and elevating him above the herd; there is no poverty, need, or pain-fully unfulfilled desire, no insecurity, and no crises: only a peaceful, enjoyable, and egalitarian living, working and consuming. Nietzsche provided us, in effect, with a scathing caricature not of
consumerism as it exists under capitalism, but fundamentally of post-capitalist society, one which
has fulfilled something like Marx’s vision of liberated consumption. Plebeian consumerism under capitalism may be getting alarmingly closer to that inglorious end station of human evolution, it may form its antechamber, but it is not quite there yet. Nietzsche thus launched a preemptive strike against a social constellation yet to materialize, a utopia; he did not reject the present – his present,
and we may add: our present – of a capitalist society in whose class structure, the Rangordnung, he
was deeply implicated.3
In attempting to sway the masses away from their consumerist dreams and brand such material ambitions as unworthy, Nietzsche – like many of his numerous followers on the left, the center, and the right – was prone to feign indifference to consumption and extol the benefits of frugality and asceticism. As he once put it, rhetorically addressing the restless workers:
But where is your inner value … if you no longer believe in philosophy that wears rags, in the free-heartedness of him without needs? If voluntary poverty and freedom from profession and marriage, such as would very well suit the more spiritual among you, have become to you things to laugh at? If, on the other hand, you have always in your ears the flutings of the Socialist pied-pipers whose design is to enflame you with wild hopes? (Nietzsche, 1997: 206)
way of curbing the ambitions of the lower orders. It is ultimately the materialism of the plebs which is being censured, not materialism as such; as confirmed by Zarathustra’s defiant claim that ‘the best belongs to me and mine; and if we are not given it, we take it: the best food, the purest sky, the most robust thoughts, the fairest women!’ (Nietzsche, 1969: 296) Such avowals may provide part of the reason why the masses are unlikely to heed rag-wearing philosophers: the luxurious and
comfortable garments worn underneath the rags are a little too eye-catching.
At a strategic point between these two positions, is located the narrative of ‘the end of history’ introduced to modern theory by Alexandre Kojève’s seminal reading – or, as many have argued,
misreading –4 of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic in Paris of the 1930s and famously
reem-ployed some five decades later by Francis Fukuyama. Kojève – to briefly sum up his move – conceived the dialectic as the motor of historical development. At its inception, two warriors confront each other in a life and death struggle. The winner, who surmounts the fear of death and is willing to risk his life, becomes the master, while the warrior who succumbs to that fear and clings to life, becomes the slave. Thereafter commences a phase of apparent limitless freedom on the master’s side, and total subjugation on the part of the slave. And yet, in and through work, the latter gradually acquires control over nature and over the idle master, who increasingly degener-ates: his life is dedicated entirely to consumption. He passively consumes the goods and services provided by the productive slave, up until the point where the initial balance of power is nearly reversed: the slave’s values and way of life gain the upper hand, and we enter a final phase of the dialectic, one of mutual human recognition and fundamental equality. This dialectic – for Hegel – was a mythopoeic attempt to reflect the historical rise of the productive bourgeoisie at the expense of the warring aristocracy, which held work in contempt. For Kojève, who during the 1930s had communist sympathies, it is further interpreted to signify the imminent triumph of the proletariat over the bourgeois themselves, who have long become exploitative idlers. He thus informed his audience at the École des Hautes Etudes, among whom was a flabbergasted, exceedingly
dis-traught Bataille,5 that the dialectic comes to conclusion not, as Hegel believed, with Napoleon’s
demolition of the Ancien Régime, but with Stalin’s communist empire.
The dialectic is also, initially, the story of production conquering consumption. And yet, at the end of history, consumption takes its surprising revenge: the development of the productive forces brought about by the bourgeoisie, and soon to be completed by the proletarian revolution, enables society to satisfy its needs in a way which is more or less universal and egalitarian. And the ulti-mate configuration of the kaleidoscope of history is thus the modern consumer society, whose contours are already visible in the West, and which is just about to be finally ushered in by world communism. It presents no further, fundamental need to propel history forward: nature has been domesticated, needs and desires are horizontally satisfied, conflicts and wars become redundant, etc. Consumption which at the beginning was the exclusive privilege of the master is now evenly
dispersed among the masses.6 Kojève affirmed such an end, and underscored its inexorable nature;
yet accompanying this affirmation was always a latent sadness: there was an existentialist, Nietzschean-Heideggerian kernel in Kojève’s ‘communist’ thought which recoiled at the prospect of a consumerist panacea. In fact, Nietzsche is probably the very originator of the ‘end of history’
matrix, which was meant to discredit the Hegelian and socialist project.7 Along with Nietzsche and
contradictions and tensions to rest, spells animalism all over again, or what postmodernists will later refer to, in a somewhat different inflection, ‘the death of man’.
This gloomy undercurrent became much more important in Kojève’s thought in the years fol-lowing the Second World War, when he lamented the animalistic Americanization of the world, and hoped to recover something of a properly human dimension via the snobbery of the Japanese way of life, embodied in the Samurai (see Drury, 1994: 53). And the same mood was subsequently reproduced by his successor, Fukuyama, who concluded his famous 1989 article with the following elegy, and forewarning:
The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, … and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands … I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed … I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945 … Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again. (Fukuyama, 1989: 18)
Bataille: A Synthesis of Marxism and Nietzscheanism?
By the early 1930s, the time when Bataille had entered the debate on historical development and consumption, the basic ideological configuration of positions concerning these questions had already taken shape, and can be thus visualized:
Hegel / Marx ← Kojève, ‘the end of history’ → Nietzsche / Heidegger.
To the left, Hegel and Marx, despite the differences between them, espouse a vision of ‘universal freedom’ (Hegel) and ‘a realm of freedom’ (Marx) of highly developed and skillful individuals interlocked into a social system of mutual dependence and solidarity, a system of myriad social needs, material and cultural, which are in turn abundantly satisfied. History can begin, after prehis-tory has been concluded (Marx, 1975: 426). Nietzsche and Heidegger, on the right, but inspiring many on the left as well, resist the completion of (pre)history, which they re-write as a social and technological dystopia, emptying existence of meaning. Nietzsche calls such a vision the realm of ‘the Last Men’, while Heidegger (2000: 40) laments the retreat of Being from a disenchanted uni-verse, a world technologically gone mad, where the supposed political alternatives of his time, the USA and the Soviet Union, ‘seen metaphysically, are both the same.’ In between these positions one finds the Kojèvean ‘end of history’ matrix, which exoterically celebrates the Hegelian-Marxist scenario, but esoterically resists it, viewing it through a Nietzschean lens.
In this historico-intellectual balance sheet, the figure of Bataille stands out as an important,
in-between figure.8 Bataille’s exceptionality can be summarized in the following paradox, which his
thought embodies: he was a fervent Nietzschean, on the one hand, and an outspoken champion of consumption, on the other hand. In this way he combined two postures which are usually not sim-ply separated but outright hostile. What explains this idiosyncrasy?
1993: 368). Bataille was keenly aware of the contradiction between Nietzsche and Marxism, stat-ing that ‘Nietzsche’s position is the only one apart from communism’ (1993: 373). Yet he thought that his work would synthesize Nietzscheanism and Marxism, harnessing both of them for the cause of social emancipation: ‘Communism,’ he claimed at the conclusion of his most important theoretical work comprising three dense volumes, ‘and the attitude of Nietzsche – similar to the
one that emerges from this work – free the subject, at the same time, of the limits imposed on it by
the past and of the objectivity of the present’ (1993: 368).
This, I believe, was a chimera. Nietzscheanism cannot be reconciled with socialism, to say noth-ing of Marxism or communism, for the simple reason that it was committed to class society and
predicated culture on exploitation. Already a very young Nietzsche, in The Greek State, established
such dependency in clear terms, a position from which he never withdrew, and which was at the heart of all his later writings:
In order for there to be a broad, deep, fertile soil for the development of art, the overwhelming majority has to be slavishly subjected to life’s necessity in the service of the minority … At their expense, through their extra work, that privileged class is to be removed from the struggle for existence … [S]lavery belongs to the essence of a culture … The misery of men living a life of toil has to be increased to make the production of the world of art possible for a small number of Olympian men. (Nietzsche, 2000: 178–179, emphasis in original)9
In striving to reconcile Nietzsche and Marx Bataille was therefore laboring under an illusion. But it was for all that a productive illusion, whose implications are worth exploring. With regard to consumption, this meant a strange melange of conflicting motifs. With Marx, Bataille affirmed
consumption, indeed celebrated it, and attacked capitalism as fundamentally ascetic. He longed for
genuine and autonomous human life, which he considered impossible without freedom from the modern imperatives of accumulation and calculation. Here the liberty to ‘consume,’ to spend one’s energies ‘sovereignly’, to indulge the appetites, fancies and desires, regardless of cost, profitability, and long-term considerations became central. And here, regarded from a Marxist perspective, there is much that recommends itself about Bataille’s approach. His vision of a world in which people are entitled to enjoy ‘the moment,’ live it to the full, without a guilty conscience, or a fear that their position in the race for accumulation will be jeopardized, is enticing and ought to figure impor-tantly in a critique of capitalism. In such seductive moments, Bataille compellingly demands a social environment in which human beings are the goal, rather than means to the ends of capital-ism; he envisions a world in which consumption will become an activity of immanent value, rather than a mere appendage to exchange-value.
Yet at the same time, he clung ferociously to a Nietzschean perspective which opposes the
con-sumption of the Last Men. This meant that Bataille’s ideal of concon-sumption was in the past, in
aristocratic and feudal class-societies, and unlike Marx he un-dialectically denied – most of the time – any advance made by capitalism on that terrain. Capitalism and consumption were con-strued, in stark opposition to Marx, not as engaged in an unhappy and unsustainable marriage, but as mutually exclusive propositions, logically and axiologically. Bataille’s Nietzschean elitism was so dominant in his thought, that his celebration of consumption, instead of offering succor to mass consumption, functioned as one more means of writing off its value. Bataille thus took a peculiar position on the master-slave dialectic, which he addressed mainly through Kojève’s mediation:
unlike Hegel, he mostly sided with the master, and lamented his loss of consumer ‘sovereignty’ in
In what follows – here, as well as in a subsequent essay – I will attempt to trace and unravel the double bind of Bataille’s philosophical and social position, and suggest its significance for thinking on consumption today. I will argue, first of all, that Bataille-1 was a fervent Nietzschean: admit-tedly a fairly straightforward claim. Secondly, I will argue that such Nietzscheanism libidinally
affixed Bataille to capitalism even as he imagined that he was fiercely rebelling against it. Bataille-1
is not merely, as some critics have argued, compatible with a late, ‘postmodern’ capitalism; as a
recognized progenitor of postmodernism he was providing capitalism with vital ideological nour-ishment. When Bataille spoke of himself as an open wound, resisting the closure of history, he was
unwittingly mimicking and abetting the refusal of capitalism itself to give way, capitalism’s own
persistence in flouting the dialectic. Thirdly, I will argue the existence of another Bataille, Bataille-2, who had glimpsed a world beyond capitalism. Bataille-1 and Bataille-2, of course, were one and the same thinker, a bundle of contradictions; they thought and diverged simultaneously. Most of the time, Bataille is a prototypical Nietzschean leftist, espousing a pessimistic, cultural critique of capitalism, akin in some ways to that of the Frankfurt School, although immeasurably more fero-cious and daring: modernity he characterized as reified, banal, standardized, inhuman, etc. But there were moments, and they became more important in the aftermath of the Second World War, in which he gave the debate surrounding modernity and consumption a striking, highly original twist: suddenly, Bataille embraces the egalitarian end of history as outlined by Kojève, and dares to synchronize it with his (allegedly) Nietzschean notion of ‘sovereignty’, a pivotal concept, far in excess of the narrowly political implication of the term though maintaining its sense of grandeur and autonomy. Being sovereign, for Bataille, denoted a condition in which the subject is in full self-possession, free to pursue his or her immanent ends in utter disregard of exterior goals, norms or expectations. It meant the cherished antinomy of vile reification, the dreaded subjection to the world of things, and opposition to all forms of slavishness and utility, where, bereft of sovereignty, one is reduced to being the instrument of some social, moral or economic project. In Bataille’s attempt to conceptualize a democratic form of such sovereignty, a fusion of mastery with equality, may lie the abiding importance of his thought as far as consumption is concerned: in pointing to a way out of Kojève’s cul-de-sac.
Let us begin with discussing the easily dominant side of Bataille, which, for the sake of clarity and convenience will be referred to as Bataille-1. We will occasionally hear another, weaker voice,
contradicting, attenuating or indeed disguising the claims of the main speaker. It is usually a
sub-merged voice, a literally smaller and fainter Bataille-2, sometimes barely audible, sometimes mak-ing big claims which are clearly inconsistent. In the concludmak-ing part of the discussion, we will nonetheless focus our attention on this voice, and try to give its claims due weight in contradistinc-tion to those of Bataille-1.
Bataille-1: Radicalism under the Sign of Dionysus
Bataille’s theory registers a genuine confusion besetting his thought, regarding political aims and social affiliation. This confusion, in turn, manifests itself in ambivalent terminology and elusive use of language. Bataille, one should always bear in mind, was an elitist with radical aspirations, or a radical with a strong elitist predisposition. These vacillations explain the often noted fact that this self-proclaimed ‘communist’ was evidently tantalized by fascism during the 1930s. Bataille truly and sincerely – in subjective terms that is – hated ‘the bourgeoisie’: this accounts for his ‘communism’, the desire to destroy bourgeois civilization with the help of the repressed, toiling masses. But at the same time, ‘the bourgeoisie’ for him meant not so much a social class of
exploit-ers, a privileged minority imposing itself on the masses, but the reified masses themselves
therefore, turned out to be typically bourgeois, incorporating the elite’s disdain for mass society. Bataille was thus patently attracted to the fascist leaders, who represented some perverse reincarna-tion of ancient ‘sovereignty’ under modern condireincarna-tions, an exciting, if flawed, resurgence of
indi-vidual ‘heterogeneity’ under conditions of mass ‘homogeneity’.10
Let us see how this paradoxical radical elitism worked itself out in Bataille. From Nietzsche, he derived an elitism which permeated his thought. Like other left-Nietzscheans, however, he pre-tended to unmoor elitism from any class affiliation, casting it rather in terms of sheer psychological
and spiritual qualities. Indeed, he denied that social placement played any role for Nietzsche
him-self, casting a blind eye to the explicit and irrevocable class context in which Nietzsche’s ‘small number of Olympian men’ operated. In the following words, for instance, written in 1938, Bataille unfavorably compared the safety seeking masses with the adventurous, happy few, heroically liv-ing on the edge:
It is impossible to imagine, without soon succumbing to extreme dread, the crowd [la foule] that turns away from this ‘horrible’ influence of chance. This crowd in fact demands that assured life no longer depend on anything but calculations and appropriate decisions. But the ‘life that only measures itself against death’ escapes those who lose the taste for burning ‘in the flames of hope and dread’, a taste shared by lovers and gamblers. Human destiny wants capricious chance to command; what reason substitutes for the rich vegetation of chance is no longer an adventure to be lived, but is instead the empty and correct solution to the difficulties of existence. (1985: 231)
Such thoughts led Bataille (1985: 233) to envision the solution in the form of minority organiza-tion, the ‘secret society’, whose covert action will purportedly transform the world culturally and politically: ‘Myth is born in ritual acts hidden from the static vulgarity of disintegrated society … even if it is true that the repercussions are decisive and transform the world.’ Or consider Bataille’s following ideas, expressed in a meeting with a friend, on December 1941:
Never has the antagonism been so great between people who have the true aspirations of people and the mass of those who live like animals, never has the tyranny been so total of animal-people over people-people who are called to live a more dangerous life, ever more hunted down, but all the more exuberant for it; only a true free-masonry of these implacable people can free and reunite the world.11
These ideas were really the standard fare of the Nietzschean analysis, from right and left, of mass society. They were regularly accompanied by a hearty denunciation of mass consumption, decried as a trite and worthless way of life, one of the most distinctive activities of the ‘animal-people’, setting them apart from, and against, the authentic few, the beleaguered ‘people-people’. But
Bataille, as we have noted, was all out for consumption, which in the years preceding the Second
World War he referred to as ‘expenditure’ [dépense] and pitted against the despicable, bourgeois
ethos of production. The point, however, is that in so doing Bataille – initially at least – by no means deviated from the Nietzschean consensus: on the contrary, his notion of expenditure was a purely Nietzschean appropriation of consumption. The departure of the French critic from the Nietzschean mainstream is largely semantic: if he champions consumption, this has virtually noth-ing to do with modern mass society. Quite the reverse is true: consumption for Bataille becomes
shorthand for everything which is lacking in modernity: sheer exuberance, wastefulness, sacrificial
rites, heroism, nobility, virility, and so on and so forth.
Explicitly, Bataille’s purpose was to demolish bourgeois modernity. Yet for Bataille the term
‘bourgeoisie’ was largely synonymous with the term ‘mass’, basically a reverse euphemism: a
rhetorical procedure whereby an odious term is used in lieu of one with positive connotations, in
Bataille’s thought that is symptomatic of the Nietzschean left in its entirety: explicitly, he was a radical social intellectual attacking the bourgeois elite on behalf of popular, mass sensitivity. In the name of an allegedly ‘Marxist conception’, he argued that the pernicious standardization, reifica-tion and flattening which are characteristic of modern life, and which Bataille referred to as ‘homogenization’, are concentrated in the capitalists and the middle classes. They are the carriers of the hateful world of things:
[T]he homogeneous part of society is made up of those men who own the means of production … It is exactly in the middle segment of the so-called capitalist or bourgeois class that the tendential reduction of human character takes place … a reflection of the homogeneous things the individual owns. This reduction is then extended as much as possible to the so-called middle classes that variously benefit from realized profit. (Bataille, 1985: 138)
The workers, by contrast, remain somehow untainted by such crippling materialism, maintaining themselves at a healthy distance from this bane, if not in the sphere of work, where they are enslaved to the bourgeoisie, at least in the sphere of consumption, where they own no-thing, and therefore remain un-owned by things:
But the industrial proletariat remains for the most part irreducible. It maintains a double relation to homogeneous activity: the latter excludes it – not from work but from profit … Outside the factory … a laborer is, with regard to a homogeneous person (boss, bureaucrat, etc.), a stranger, a man of another nature, of a non-reduced, nonsubjugated nature. (Bataille, 1985: 138)
But such popular alignment, as we already witnessed, was recurrently belied by the fact that Bataille in truth felt himself a member of minuscule group of special ‘people-people’ surrounded by the hostile ‘animal-people’, the enormous majority. It transpires that his belief in a heroic, frugal working class was merely a recitation of radical catechism bereft of real conviction. Because ‘the bourgeoisie’ in such terms was not restricted to the owners of the means of production, nor to the rich, nor even to the middle classes, but a term encompassing virtually everyone outside of Bataille’s close circle of free-thinking people, understanding themselves as a Nietzschean avant-garde, it really could function exactly as the term ‘masses’ did before. In fact, in the post-war text
The Accursed Share the reader was on several occasions informed that reification, far from having
blissfully spared the workers, is first and foremost a proletarian attribute: ‘The communists always
give precedence to things … This attitude is based solidly on the tastes of the proletarians, who
commonly lack a sense of spiritual values … and who see the human universe as a system of things
subordinated to one another.’ What is more, critique of reification, in however feeble and indeci-sive form, comes precisely from the ranks of those who were formerly declared to be wholly reified – the bourgeoisie. Unabashed proletarian materialism, Bataille (1991: 141) affirms, ‘gives to the bourgeois, to the exploitation which the workers want to abolish, the feeling of upholding freedom
for mankind, of avoiding the reduction of individuals to things.’ The same point is made in Volume
Consumation
Is Not
Consommation
For all his emphasis on consumption, Bataille flatly rejected capitalist modernity, which is after all the historical class system which has ushered in considerable mass – as distinct from solely elite – consumption. Bataille did not mean to contradict Marx; he was after all a self-avowed ‘commu-nist’. Yet his position on consumption was nonetheless fundamentally at odds with that expounded
by Marx. For the latter, capitalism signified a marked improvement when adjudged historically,
compared to former modes of production. It entailed a favorable, if flawed and limited, democra-tization of politics and culture. ‘This progression,’ Marx ascertained (1993: 589–590), ‘belongs [to] and is exploited by capital. All earlier forms of property condemn the greater part of humanity, the slaves, to be pure instruments of labour. Historical development, political development, art, science, etc. take place in higher circles over their heads. But only capital has subjugated historical progress to the service of wealth.’ Bataille’s ideal of consumption, by contrast, was ensconced in the remote past. For examples of formidable expenditure he needed to retreat as far back as the Middle Ages or the Aztec rites of human sacrifice. He affirmed the consumption of the rich
aristo-crat of yore, whose acts of squandering were interpreted as signs of prodigality, actes gratuites,
opposed to the puny bourgeois emphasis on production. Consumption he recognized in the first stages of the historical dialectic, in the sovereign activity of the master. He drew a distinction between modern ‘productive consumption’, which is merely a leftover of production, and ancient-cum-medieval ‘unproductive expenditure’ which includes ‘luxury, mourning, war, cults, the con-struction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e. deflected from genital finality).’ These are all activities, Bataille asserted (1985: 118), ‘which, at least in primitive circumstances have no end beyond themselves. Now it is necessary to reserve the use of the word expenditure for the designation of these unproductive forms, and not for the designation of all the modes of consumption that serve as a means to the end of production.’
Marx, once again, strongly disagrees. In revealing passages he attacked such propositions as
Bataille’s on both quantitative grounds – underlining the great increase in consumption brought
about by capitalism – and qualitative grounds – dismissing the extravagant consumption of the
ancient elite as hollow and, in a sense, an optical illusion. Marx agrees with Ricardo, that under capitalism ‘the great majority of producers remains more or less excluded from the consumption of wealth.’ But he stresses that their exclusion was more hermetic in former times:
This was indeed also the case, and to an even higher degree, in the ancient modes of production which depended on slavery … The wealth which they produced for private consumption was therefore relatively small and only appears great because it was amassed in the hands of a few persons, who, incidentally, did not know what to do with it. Although, therefore, there was no over-production among the ancients, there was over-consumption by the rich, which in the final periods of Rome and Greece turned into mad extravagance. (Marx, 2000: 528)
But, of course, it is precisely consumption as ‘mad extravagance’ that Bataille sought to reanimate. Bataille conceived of consumption in such a ‘grandiose’ way, as to exclude, ignore, or dismiss the mundane understanding of the term. Common, ‘small’, everyday acts of consumption simply can-not expect to meet such a standard. To start with, they were associated with what is natural and affords straightforward, plentiful, instinctual enjoyment. In the early Marx we find a vindication of this sunny aspect of human nature in the characterization of a protagonist of a novel by Eugène Sue:
surroundings. She is good because the sun and the flowers reveal to her her own sunny and blossoming nature. She is good because she is still young, full of hope and vitality. Her situation is not good, because it puts an unnatural constraint on her, because it is not the expression of her human impulses, not the fulfillment of her human desires; because it is full of torment and without joy. (Marx and Engels, 1975: 200, emphases in original)
For Bataille, however, human desire rather thrives on torment, not joy. He exalted acts of
consump-tion which tend to be destructive and negative. Such acts were purposefully defined as destructive, their negativity becoming their mark of honor. Far from shunning the causing of ‘suffering to anyone’, the inflicting of pain, on oneself as well as others, was considered a major source of pleas-ure and humanity, perhaps their very mainspring. Hence Bataille’s notorious fascination with rites of sacrifice, mutilation, necrophilia, and so on and so forth. Sexuality for him was closely linked with death, which explains why the medieval mass killer and pedophile, the aristocrat Gilles de Rais, formed a subject of his admiration.
For Bataille, expenditure – i.e. proper consumption – is not rational, useful, moderate or even pleasurable in the common sense of the term. It is not, in other words, to be confused with what is commonly referred to as ‘mass consumption’. The latter is merely an epiphenomenon of the bour-geois emphasis on production: it revolves around acquisition, conservation, etc. Expenditure alone truly defies the bourgeois logic, since it disregards all norms of utility and conservation. It involves an orgy of destruction, torment and loss, an existential plunge into the naked, irrational and
head-less – ‘a-cephalic’ – horror of existence. Thus, at the very beginning of The Notion of Expenditure,
one finds a repudiation of the bourgeois ‘principle of classical utility’:
The goal of the [principles of classical utility] is, theoretically, pleasure – but only in a moderate form, since violent pleasure is seen as pathological. On the one hand, this material utility is limited to acquisition (in practice, to production) and to the conservation of goods; on the other, it is limited to reproduction and to the conservation of human life (to which is added … the struggle against pain, whose importance itself suggests the negative character of the pleasure principle instituted, in theory, as the basis of utility) … [I]t is sad to say that conscious humanity has remained a minor; humanity recognizes the right to acquire, to conserve, and to consume rationally, but it excludes in principle nonproductive expenditure. (Bataille, 1985: 116–117)
In order to demarcate proper consumption, well-nigh extinct under bourgeois rule, from the ‘mod-erate’, mass consumption which characterizes such rule, Bataille was driven to the use of a French
neologism of his own making – the noun consumation – as distinct from mundane consumption,
consommation in French (see Bataille, 1993: 431). In highly instructive passages, capitalist society was accused for its rampant egalitarianism. ‘The doctrinaire politicians’ were charged with pro-moting ‘equal well-being for all.’ And Bataille continued:
No one thinks that political action can be defined and take shape in the personal form of legendary heroes. The just distribution of material and cultural goods alone allays their all-consuming concern with avoiding everything that resembles the human face and its expressions of avid desire or happy defiance before death. (Bataille, 1985: 227)
More carefully examined, what Bataille called ‘bourgeois utility’ looks very similar indeed to the
category of use-value, too. He opposed not simply capitalist usefulness but usefulness as such. The upshot of this striking re-conceptualization is that any activity which is made with the intention of enhancing human well-being is affixed with the unflattering adjective of being ‘bourgeois’. To be ‘bourgeois’ is not mainly to exploit or accumulate private riches, but to calculate, to reckon with future dangers and prospects, to consider material conditions, etc., etc.
For Marx, freedom is distinguished from necessity; for Bataille, freedom rather stands in
oppo-sition to necessity and utility. ‘Life beyond utility,’ he emphasized (1993: 198), ‘is the domain of
sovereignty.’ Human freedom means to negate, to break the mould, deny the animalism of material
satisfaction; sovereignty means to act without any consideration of material reward or future con-sequences. This important re-definition has to do with Bataille’s existential understanding of humanity as a negation of the given (compare Drury, 1994: 115). Consequentially, production and consumption are viewed as antagonistic, whereas Marx regarded them as integral. For Bataille to consume is not so much to enjoy the fruits of production, but rather to destroy them, annihilate the productive means, lavishly squander, up to and including the ultimate luxury: destroying and con-suming human lives. Bataille’s conception is imbued with a quasi-religious distinction – or perhaps a quintessentially religious one – between the sacred and the profane, the former epiphanic,
won-drous, miraculous, the latter banal, calculable, everyday.12 In the following passage, from The
Accursed Share, one finds a religious longing for a glorious moment in many ways akin to the Badiouan longing for the event:
More generally, this miracle to which the whole of humanity aspires is manifested among us in the form of beauty, of wealth – in the form, moreover, of violence, of funereal and sacred sadness; in the form of glory. What is the meaning of art, architecture, music, painting or poetry if not the anticipation of a suspended, wonder-struck moment, a miraculous moment? (Bataille, 1993: 200)
This means that the ‘bourgeois’ dominion was ultimately rejected qua the reign of the banal, the everyday, the useful. This is, put more conventionally, the profane realm of the masses. Capitalism – in such a romantic reading – is not so much cataclysmic, unjust and unhappy, as it is stable, stale
and boring.13 Let the moment and the event come and disrupt its routines, not because they are
‘bad’, but because they are just that: routines. Consumation and everyday life are thus seen as
incompatible; to consume sovereignly is to break free of the normal.14 In a move characteristic of
romantic anti-capitalism, Bataille was obsessed with fighting prohibitions, marshalling against them ‘perversions’ of all sorts: the evil lies not in bad rules and corrupt institutions, but rather in rules and institutions as such – in that respect anticipating Foucault, who will be the most salient
Bataillean in the second half of the 20th century.15
The Pitfalls of Permanent Transgression
Such an ideology of transgression can be subjected to two kinds of political criticism: the first one
concerns the absence of a truly radical thrust. Behind the dizzying façade, absolute negation tends
to move in a circular fashion, and often ends up negating itself. Paradoxically, this ultra-anarchism
leads to an affirmation of present institutions,16 of present norms and codes: what would be the
them; that whoever wants to be sovereignly – but alone – free to transgress them must seek the dark, frightful and infernal pleasure of this curse and this fear’ (in Surya, 2002: 451). As Bataille himself put it, he wanted to ‘make plain the futility of the common contention that sexual taboos are nothing but prejudice, and it is high time we were rid of them.’ The surprising role of social injunctions as providing the very foundation for transgression, also carries seriously damaging implications which affect the core claims of ‘sovereignty’. Sovereignty as theorized by Bataille recommends itself as an act of total freedom, completely self-referential and autonomous. It is sup-posed to provide a trance which obliterates society and its asphyxiating mores. Such aloofness
however appears illusory, once its obligation to épater le bourgeois is computed. Sovereignty
appears to owe its existence to that very mass society which it aims to negate. This recalls Hegel’s shrewd exposure of the deceptive autonomy of the Cynics. ‘Diogenes,’ he observed, ‘in his whole character as a Cynic, is in fact merely a product of the social life of Athens, and what determined him was the opinion against which his entire way of life reacted. His way of life was therefore not independent, but merely a consequence of these social conditions, and itself an unprepossessing product of luxury.’ (Hegel, 2010: 231) Under close inspection, therefore, the sovereign is seen to
react rather than act, not a major offence, perhaps, but one which becomes very grave indeed
within a Nietzschean framework where few travesties are as bad as slavish ressentiment. Then
again, one could hardly criticize Bataille where Nietzsche himself had faulted and where success, at least according to Fredric Jameson, is structurally unattainable. Jameson (1981: 202) cannily
pointed out ‘the autoreferential structure’ of the ressentiment ideologeme, claiming that ‘the theory
of ressentiment, wherever it appears, will always itself be the expression and the production of
ressentiment.’
Secondly, to the extent that Bataillean transgression can help to combat institutions, it is by no
means clear that its impact would be progressive, rather than conservative or reactionary. The purely formalistic nature of ‘negation’ means that it is a weapon that can cut both ways, in the cause of social repression and dispossession no less than that of popular empowerment. From a Hegelian and Marxist point of view, a society without institutions and prohibitions is neither conceivable nor desirable. The point is rather to abolish bad institutions, change and reform ambivalent ones, and create new practices and institutions, more adapted for the needs, wishes and desires of multi-faceted, able and communicative ‘social individuals’ who are the products of historical develop-ment. But to fight institutions as such? Was not the demand to be admitted into existing institutions, say schools and hospitals, a fundamental progressive social demand, which was obtained only after prolonged and bitter historical struggles? But with Bataille and his major follower Foucault, insti-tutions themselves become suspect.
exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.’ For Foucault, these were ‘Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine.’ Chomsky agreed, but instructively had enough presence of mind to emphasize the need to fight other institu-tions as well which feign social neutrality, ‘the central instituinstitu-tions of any industrial society, namely the economic, commercial and financial institutions and in particular, in the coming period, the great multi-national corporations.’ (Chomsky, 1971) This exchange took place when the European welfare state was at its historical peak. It may not be a complete coincidence that, more than four decades later, and following an all-out Foucauldian postmodernist onslaught on ‘power’ – an attack which was Bataillean at a second remove – the welfare state is in a sorry condition, whereas the multi-national corporations are stronger than ever.
Conclusion
Bataille’s contradictory politics thus overtly embraces radicalism but remains in some ways para-doxically affirmative of the present political constellation. In a subsequent essay, completing the analysis, a closer scrutiny of Bataille’s ambiguous relationship to capitalism will be undertaken, the claims of Bataille-2 will be presented, and their significance within his overall scheme assessed.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for useful comments on a previous draft of this article, as well as Luis Landa and Harrison Fluss for their perceptive readings and very helpful suggestions.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. To be sure, the very young Marx of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts was apparently more critical of nascent consumerism, as countless interpreters have emphasized, persistently drawing attention to this text rather than to the more mature works such as Grundrisse or Capital. For limitations of space I will not go into this matter here – I am undertaking a fuller analysis of the evolution of Marx’s thought on consumption in a book-length study I am currently working on. I will only add that even in the so-called Paris manuscripts, Marx ultimately criticizes capitalism as ascetic. ‘This science of the marvels of industry,’ he affirmed, ‘is at the same time the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but rapacious skinflint, and the ascetic but productive slave’ (Marx, 1975: 360–361).
2. Occasionally I depart from the translation, in agreement with the original German.
3. For that reason, and for all his sarcastic and anxious snobbery, Nietzsche can plausibly be construed as an ally of capitalist consumption, to the extent – and only to the extent – that it is regarded as a historical ne plus ultra, allowing no further evolution. Such a reading was in fact defended by Norbert Bolz (2002) in his book Das konsumistische Manifest [The Consumerist Manifesto], where modern, capitalist consumer society is regarded, with certain spiteful glee, as the ultimate triumph of a free-spirited, playful, post-modern Nietzscheanism over the fanatic, moralistic and post-modernist utopia of Marxism. Needless to say, for such a purpose Nietzsche’s disgust at mass consumption needs to be glossed over, while, conversely, Marx must be read as a stern ascetic.
4. For example Anderson (1992) and Rockmore (2009).
5. Bataille, who came away from Kojève’s weekly lectures ‘bursting, crushed, killed twice over: suffocated and transfixed.’ (Bataille as quoted in Surya, 2002: 189).
reserved to the liberal-capitalist order, whose newly assured hegemony was taken to signify the final horizon in the evolution of civilization.
7. ‘The end of history idea as we know it today came from very definite, non-Hegelian sources, the earliest of which may be found in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche.’ (Dale, 2006)
8. The following is not meant as a general survey of Bataille’s work, which will take us too far afield. References will be made to some of Bataille’s major concepts, such as ‘sovereignty-servility’ or the ‘homogeneity-heterogeneity’ contrasts, but only inasmuch as they are necessary for the discussion. For a fuller treatment of Bataille, see Noys (2000), and Surya (2002), which is also very informative on Bataille’s overall trajectory. Also valuable is Richman (1990, 2005). For more critical general surveys see Drury (1994, chapter 8), Wolin (2004, chapter 4), and Preparata (2007). A good starting point for an exploration of Bataille’s literary output and his significance for postmodern thought and art is Hussey’s (2006) collection of essays. On the elective affinities, as well as important differences, between Bataille and key Frankfurt School thinkers see Weingrad’s instructive survey (2001). For a refined analysis of Bataille’s political evolution, understood in terms of a quest for an elusive virility, see Suleiman (1994). 9. In my view, the fullest and most accurate treatment of Nietzsche’s politics is Domenico Losurdo’s metic-ulous study (2014). For a helpful overview of Nietzsche’s vast influence on sociological thought see Antonio (1995).
10. Bataille’s admirers are keen to downplay his embarrassing fascination with fascism, yet the evidence for it is incontrovertible. A single example will have to suffice here: in one infamous pamphlet issued by Contre-Attaque, the short-lived group Bataille had founded in the 1930s, Nazism was explicitly pre-ferred over mainstream politics. ‘We are against … the slavish prose of the chancelleries … We prefer to them, come what may, the anti-diplomatic brutality of Hitler, which is more peaceful than the slobbering excitation of the diplomats and politicians’ (cited in Wolin, 2004: 181). The following essays, while pro-tective of Bataille, nonetheless variously concede his ambivalence toward fascism in the 1930s: Stoekl (1990), Suleiman (1994), Richman (1997) and Geroulanos (2006).
11. Bataille’s words, as recorded by his friend Jean Piel and quoted in Surya (2002: 289–290). 12. On Bataille as ‘a religious type’ see Preparata (2007: 35).
13. Compare this to the following assessment of the way Slavoj Žižek – another kindred spirit – relates to capitalism: ‘Žižek’s critique of capitalism is not, therefore, material in nature … [H]is problem with capi-talism … appears to be that [it] lacks the fundamental antagonisms Marx described and thus is “boring” when compared with precapitalist societies’ (Robinson and Tormey, 2006: 151).
14. Indeed, consumation may not be simply distinct from consommation but violently opposed to it. The destructiveness of sovereign consumption can be feasibly construed as a revolt against degraded con-sumerism. Thus, in a recent essay, a partly Bataillean framework is employed to make sense of the shift from docile consumerism to unleashed violence in several novels by English author J.G. Ballard. ‘Ballard’s late fiction,’ it is suggested, ‘indicates that the infantilizing illusions promoted by consumer-ism will result in boredom punctured only by outbreaks of violence’ (Matthews, 2013: 122).
15. Bataille on occasions explicitly aligned himself with the romantic criticism of the bourgeoisie. See: Bataille (1991: 29).
16. On Bataille’s anarchism see Rousselle (2012).
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