Bataille UBI Aff - DDI 2023 KM

AFF---UBI Bataille
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Part One is The General Economy
Prevailing understandings of economics neglect how life is fundamentally wasteful: productive acts leave us with a share of energy which cannot be invested back into productive ends. This “Accursed Share” must always be disposed of excessively: either gloriously, via ceremonies which embrace unproductive expenditure, or catastrophically in the form of warfare.
Kincade ‘12 – Jonathan Kincade, PhD in Philosophy from the University of California, Los Angeles. “The Tower is Everywhere: Symbolic Exchange and Discovery of Meaning in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49”, Thesis, Georgia State University, 05/06/2012, pg. 2-4; DOI: 10.57709/2397125 | RN
Symbolic (Exchange)
Although he himself never used the words, the very notion of symbolic exchange is derived from French intellectual Georges Bataille’s notions related to acts of consumption, which are constitutive of what he calls a “general economy.” Bataille argues that waste, expenditure, and destruction are more fundamental to human life than production and utility, and under such general economy these fundamentals would be naturally achieved. Human beings are characterized as beings of excess and, in part, the process of symbolic exchange is related to the expenditure of excess energy. Because of humans’ natural proclivity for waste, production has limits under a “restrictive” (capitalist) economy, as Bataille notes:
When one considers the totality of productive wealth on the surface of the globe, it is evident that the products of this wealth can be employed for productive ends only insofar as the living organism that is economic mankind can increase its equipment (Bataille 22)
In a capitalist economy, energy can only be spent towards production insofar as there is demand for the energy behind commodified labor. The capitalist mode of production is one of utility, making labor quantitatively limited in employment. As a result, Bataille argues, a surplus of energy is created after demand is met and work is completed. Such line of thought seems derivative of Marx, who himself theorized that surplus was to the detriment of capitalism, as the surplus must be spent regardless of an over abundance of commodities and the reduction of general exchange-values. In keeping with this idea, Bataille realizes that a surplus of energy must be spent in some manner external to production which ensures the expenditure of excess energy.
Here Bataille’s theory seems reminiscent of the thermodynamic concept of entropy, which regards the amount of energy available for work in closed thermodynamic systems and the chaos that arises as a result (a major thematic notion in many of Pynchon’s novels that will be returned to later this analysis). In thermodynamic entropy, the excess energy that remains after productive expenditure must also be spent and it is dissipated through waste heat, just as a capitalist “surplus must be dissipated through deficit operations” (Bataille 22) to ensure optimal valuation of commodities. Yet the link between the thermodynamic concept and the informational concept seems vague, as Nefastis notes in Pynchon’s novel: “Entropy is a figure of speech, then…a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow” (Pynchon 85), but only in the sense that the equations from both fields seem similar (the significance of such a relationship will also be returned to later). Consumption and the expenditure of that which otherwise goes towards a productive capacity is constitutive of symbolic exchange, and symbolic acts manifest themselves as fundamentally wasteful acts: war, festivity, sacrifice, and gift-giving stand as notable instances. Bataille reached the conclusion that if individuals wanted to be sovereign, transcending even Marxist notions of sovereignty (i.e. communism), they should embrace a general economy of waste and expenditure, freeing them from the capitalist imperatives of utility and demand.
Bataille’s idea of a general economy sees import in anthropological notions of how meaning is conveyed and received within society. Theorist Jean Baudrillard cites what he calls “primitive societies” as evocative of the thought that symbolic exchange is not tied to notions of production, although expenditure and waste still are still fundamental to the symbolic act. For Bataille, production made symbolic exchange possible, yet for Baudrillard “‘subsistence’ and ‘economic exchange’ are the residue of symbolic exchange, a remainder. Symbolic circulation is primordial” (“Mirror” 79), operating on the idea that “we are in exchange universally…that the only thing that exists is what can assume value, and hence pass from one to another” (“Passwords” 73). Primitive societies, those who do not operate based on the general notions of productive economies, that is to say production superseding consumption, expend goods based on the symbolic nature of sacrifice itself in relation to a utilitarian valuation of that which is sacrificed. Here, physical goods are wasted and exchanged in favor of the meaning that rests behind the literal event. Events such as feasts are wasteful in their application of excess food, which is almost never fully consumed, but such excess is exchanged for the communality, and for the meaning of the cause of the feast, that occurs as a result.
Economic rationality, through its fixation on profit motives, fails insofar as it tries to impose instrumental reason onto agents, neglecting the ways in which energy, unproductivity, and excess are intertwined. Instead, what is needed is a “General Economy”—one which studies the interrelation between expenditure and the political economy.
May-Hobbs ‘22 – Moses May-Hobbs, recent graduate of Cambridge University, contributing writer and editor for The Collector. “The Accursed Share: Georges Bataille on War, Luxury and Economics”. The Collector. November 9, 2022. https://www.thecollector.com/georges-bataille-accursed-share-economics/. Accessed 7/13/23//EKW
The Need for a Theory of General Economy Before unpacking the nature and implications of non-productive expenditure, it is first necessary to explain more fully what George Bataille means by ‘general economy’ and why he thinks it is an important, and unacknowledged, field of study. Bataille notes in Volume 1 of The Accursed Share that while there might be some simple activities, like the ploughing of a field, that can be easily imagined in isolation from the rest of the world, as soon as we start to think on a larger scale this kind of subdivision becomes impossible. Bataille diagnoses the failure of most theories of political economy as emerging from a related narrow sightedness: economists tend to think of the economy of a country, or even the entire world, as being an aggregation of hypothetically subdivisible activities and events. As such, theorists of economics, in Bataille’s estimation, tend to miss patterns and laws that are visible only when economy is assessed at its most general level. Crucially, for Bataille, this most general level of economy includes causes and events which would never be noticed or deemed relevant by the specialized economist. Bataille writes: “In overall industrial development, are there not social conflicts and planetary wars? In the global activity of men, in short, are there not causes and effects that will appear only provided that the general data of the economy are studied?” (Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume 1) Above all, the kinds of events and practices Bataille wants to bring into view of political economy are wars, religious practices (and especially sacrifices), and sexual practices. Expanding the field of political economy to that of ‘general economy’ also inflects Bataille’s thinking with a biological component: the contemplation of human societies as continuous with, or analogous to, organic ones. The investment of monetary wealth in the growth of an economic system becomes just one instance of a more general pattern. Bataille then goes on to suggest that in all these systems, some portion of the wealth generated cannot be usefully spent: “The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, 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, The Accursed Share: Volume 1)
Accumulation without discharge must eventually boil over in the form of destructive warfare which represents the obliteration of all that we have accumulated.
Zwier and Block ‘20 – Jochem Zwier, Professor of Philosophy at University of Twente and Vincent Blok, Professor of Philosophy at Wageningen University. “Energetic Ethics. Georges Bataille in the Anthropocene” in Global Changes: Ethics, Politics and Environment in the Contemporary Technological World, edited by Luca Valera, Center for Bioethics and Department of Philosophy at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Juan Carlos Castilla, Department of Ecology, Faculty of Biological Sciences, and Center for Bioethics at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, pg. 177-178 ID.ELC
15.4 Energetic Ethics Bataille’s economic thought has an ethical character inasmuch as it addresses what he calls the “failure of humanity” (Bataille 2007, 15) to take heed of the general economy. In exclusively adhering to the restricted economy and thus solely addressing energy in terms of its efficient production, humanity becomes increasingly exposed to the abundant influx and pressure of the general economy. As with any living system, this causes expansion. But where the logic of the restricted economy celebrates such expansion under the heading of economic growth, Bataille stresses that all growth must eventually run out of space. When this happens, pressure builds up, and like any limited system that is subjected to increasing pressure, it finally explodes. Writing in the aftermath of two world wars which he understands as “the greatest orgies of wealth that history has recorded” (Bataille 1991, 37), Bataille imagines—with Argus’ eyes—the eruption of another war as the explosive and catastrophic outcome of (or rather outlet for) uncontainable pressure. As with other constituents of the general economy, “the impossibility of continuing growth makes way for squander” (Bataille 1991, 29), which in the case of forgetful human existence takes the catastrophic form of war. For Bataille therefore, the failure of neglecting the general economy “causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our own way” (Bataille 1991, 23). This failure evidently concerns ethics, and Bataille explicitly aims to find better ways of dealing with excess energy, of “exhausting the surplus without war” (Bataille 2007, 428). In exploring cultural history, he famously finds examples of pressure exhausts in the ritual of potlach, where the indigenous people in the American northwest wasted surplus energy by way of the destruction of accumulated and produced resources, for instance by wrecking one’s canoes, up to setting one’s own village on fire (Bataille 1991, 67–68). Other examples include pyramids as an energetically inefficient burial method (119), Lamaist monks who avoided activity in contemplative life, thus dissipating the surplus generated by Tibetan workers (Bataille 1991, 93–110), jewels, works of art (Bataille 1989; Wendlin 2007, 39), and most eminently eroticism (Bataille 1986, 2007). All of these indicate a different approach to energy: rather than considering it a scarce good to be accumulated and put to work, they acknowledge rather than forget its constitutive abundance, accordingly attesting to how “it is not necessity but its contrary, ‘luxury’ that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems” (Bataille 1991, 12). For Bataille, such luxury is a fundamental ethical problem, given how refraining from burning off (178 J. Zwier and V. Blok) excess energy eventually causes humanity to undergo its catastrophic dissipation in war.
Modern politics serves the productive suppression of excess, giving way to co-option by Fascist demagogues towards whom traditional politics is defenseless and even servile and who channel sacred impulses towards conquest, work, and the suppression of racialized others: instead, we advocate for a revolutionary politics which embraces expenditure in opposition to existing political formations.
Towsend ‘18 – Simon Townsend is an Associate Lecturer in Politics at the University of Exeter. “The Exploitation of Sacred Desire: Rethinking Georges Bataille's Political Theory”, Theory & Event 21 (4), October 2018, pg. 854-857; https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/707013
Bataille's analysis of capitalist-democracies is cursory, presumably because he condemns them as a short-lived phenomenon, which will inevitably give way to other forms of political organization (P 198). This damning judgment stems from two arguments that relate to the genesis of a capitalist spirit that is hostile to unproductive expenditure. In the first, he follows Max Weber in crediting the Protestant Reformation with a decisive role in shaping the capitalist spirit (AS 123). In the Middle-Ages, Catholicism masterfully manipulated the desire for squandering by institutionalizing indulgences and other forms of buying spiritual credit, and by spending its prodigious wealth lavishly on churches that were packed with awe-inspiring but otherwise useless ornaments (AS 122). Nobles and merchants felt obliged to match this spectacular expenditure, creating an ostentatious equilibrium (AS 122). When Luther insisted on "the Gospel's principle of hostility to wealth and luxury" he drove the imposition of a moral code opposing excess and squandering (AS 121). This destroyed "the world of unproductive consumption" and obliterated the remnants of religion's sacred appeal (AS 127). In the second argument, Bataille claims that capitalist-democracies emerged from revolutions awash in antiauthoritarian fervour, including hostility towards institutions that have traditionally tapped into sacred desire, notably the monarchy, church, and the military (PF 158). This atmosphere fostered the rise of the bourgeoisie, a ruling class peerless in their hatred of expenditure, who are unwilling to fulfil their "obligation" to expend part of their wealth gloriously (AS 124–5). Capitalism is, then, an "unreserved surrender to things", a "metamorphosis" in the "civilized world" where future accumulation is prioritized over present desires (AS 136/LE 55). Democratic politicians are merely spokespeople for the world of work, competing with rival plans for economic efficiency.
Ignorance of sacred forces is, for Bataille, politically catastrophic. Not only does it reflect a lack of awareness of the experiences that make human existence meaningful, but it also exposes society to the explosive release of repressed forces. Many commentators have emphasised Bataille's concern that the decline in spectacular festivals under bourgeois capitalism will lead to an excess of sacred desire and surplus resources being invested into imperialistic adventures and catastrophic wars on a scale hitherto unimagined. Another consequence of societies neglecting sacred desire is that they become increasingly vulnerable to the challenge posed by charismatic leaders who establish otherness to the world of work. This increases the likelihood of populist movements and exposes society to the extreme expression of this tendency: the risk of fascist coups.
Fascism is the supreme example of a system where sacred impulses are directed into avenues abstracted from the natural world. Fascist leaders embody sacred force by establishing their otherness from the everyday world: "opposed to democratic politicians… Mussolini and Hitler immediately stand out as something other" (PF 143). This otherness, which accounts for their psychological sway over the population, derives from a confluence of abstract sources. Fascist leaders exploit the desire for lost intimacy, conjuring up and exploiting nostalgia, both real and imaginary, promising the "recovery of the lost world" and a rejuvenated communal life that opposes democratic disintegration. They capitalise on crises by promising "vulgar and facile solutions" (NC 204). They bolster this power by appropriating the power of traditional institutions capable of generating, disciplining and controlling sacred impulses. Fascist societies tend to exploit the military model, expanding it to encompass the entire state. The leader performs the role of the army chief, who embodies "intense sacredness" through identification with the glorious triumphs of the institution. Each soldier equates himself with the leader's glory, and thus people from "different origins" are symbolically assimilated into the collective (this contrasts with other elites, such as monarchies, characterised by their otherness to the lower classes (PF 154)). The chief's glory forms and disciplines individuals: "the mass that constitutes the army passes from a depleted and ruined existence to a purified geometric order, from formlessness to aggressive rigidity" (PF 151). Bataille observes that military authority alone rarely secures "long-lasting domination"; the leader usually needs to co-opt the sacred appeal of religion by adopting a quasi-divine role (PF 151–2). The fascist leader exploits sacred impulses to generate allegiance and underpin the world of work by imposing "duty, discipline, and obedience" (PF 155). Thus, sacred impulses are placed firmly in the service of the world of work and its ideals. Unruly elements are suppressed by "socially heterogeneous institutions like the government, army and police".13 For Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, the imperative to sacrifice oneself for the world of work and the good of the community reached its most excessive form in Nazi Germany, producing its truth in "genocidal extermination".14
For Bataille, fascism is not a primitive formation, a return to the violence of nature, but a manifestation of the drive towards order and purification from nature, the same drive that creates the world of work. Its methods for generating sacred power are abstract, removed from association with the violent squandering of nature and unproductive resource squandering. It might be objected that part of the appeal of fascist leaders is that they wield the power of violence, and this connects them to the natural world of squandering. Fascist violence, however, has little in common with the indiscriminate squandering [End Page 855] of nature. This is not just because it is organized violence—we know that, for Bataille, Aztec violence was both organized and invoked horrific nature. The Aztecs, however, made every effort to disguise the fact that they were sacrificing an outsider to the community by spending months integrating him into the community, parading him around and showering him with gifts (AC 50). Fascist violence, on the other hand, is explicitly directed at those it portrays as outsiders to the community, at those it considers impure and inferior. When the idea of the sacred loses contact with natural horrors, such as when it is expressed in a desire for lost continuity and when it is embodied by authoritarian demagogues, it loses the power to enduringly captivate and satisfy sacred desire: "The reckless flight from death is impossible and self-defeating, only serving to produce new forms of servitude" (AS II 217). These new forms of servitude are fascist and religious societies where sacred associations are used to justify subordinating citizens to the world of work. Even when not used for this en

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