Valorizing expenditure recreates instrumental reason Bataille hopes to escape

At times, Bataille's celebration of transgression for its own sake seems woefully simplistic. In lieu of a conceptual framework that would permit one to distinguish between constructive and retrograde instances of transgression, we are left with an ethos of shock, rupture, and disruption simpliciter. Bataille seeks to ground postmodern ethics in the attitudes of a cultural avant-garde (Acephale and the College of Sociology) oriented toward precapitalist life forms that modernity has scorned. Yet the very idea of achieving a conceptual reckoning with Bataille-generated ideals such as "transgression," "heterogeneity," and "expenditure" would seem inimical to their very spirit. In his idiom, to rely on procedures of principled legitimation or a rational accountability would be to succumb to the logic and rhetoric of "productive consumption"—the values of a society predicated on instrumental reason and commodity exchange. (165)