Bataille’s theory of expenditure doesn’t apply to postmodern consumer capitalism, which is based on massive amounts of consumption and waste – exactly what Bataille advocates.
Yang 2000 (Mayfair Mei-hui, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Santa Barbara, has held fellowships at the Center for Chinese Studies of the University of Michigan, the Chicago Humanities Institute, University of Chicago, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, “Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place: Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure,” Current Anthropology, University of Chicago Journals)
Scholars such as Jean‐Joseph Goux () have pointed to a troubling overlap between Bataille’s views on luxury and sacrificial expenditure and postmodern consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism is also predicated on massive consumption and waste rather than on the thrift, asceticism, and accumulation against which Bataille directed his theory of expenditure. It exhibits potlatch features in the tendency for businesses to give goods away in the hope that “supply creates its own demand”; it collapses the distinction between luxury and useful goods and between need and desire (Goux ). Unlike modernist capitalism, postmodern consumer capitalism is driven by consumption rather than production. Thus, Bataille’s vision of the ritual destruction of wealth as defying the principles of accumulative and productive capitalism does not address this different phase of consumer capitalism, whose contours have only become clear since his death in 1962. It seems to me that despite their overt similarities, the principles of ritual consumption and those of consumer capitalism are basically incompatible. If Bataille had addressed our consumer society today, he would have said that this sort of consumption is still in the service of production and productive accumulation, since every act of consumption in the world of leisure, entertainment, media, fashion, and home décor merely feeds back into the growth of the economy rather than leading to the finality and loss of truly nonproductive expenditure. Even much of modern warfare is no longer truly destructive but tied into the furthering of military‐industrial production. Nor, despite its economic excesses, does our consumer culture today challenge the basic economic logic of rational private accumulation as a self‐depleting archaic sacrificial economy does. Furthermore, capitalist consumption is very much an individual consumption rather than one involving the whole community or social order.