Remember Bataille

The Notion of the Gift

Why do we crave death?

Somewhatmistaken posed some excellent questions in her comment to the previous post. I forwarded those questions to Georges Bataille, and he decided to send his next epistle early just so he could address them.

There is an important element of life to consider in death. Bataille takes great pains to point out the explosion of life involved in a corpse. Within minutes, insects have begun colonizing the dead flesh. Their young feast, grow to adulthood, and so a species is propogated. What's more, these colonies of insects break down the corpse into even smaller nutrative elements, allowing generations of plant life to thrive. The corpse as an explosion of life is invisible only to human beings, who are infinitely distracted in their horror of the corpse's putrefaction. Humans stand in a forest and gaze at eye level upon the thriving trunks of the trees, or above at the dew-shimmering canopy of trees. Perhaps they kneel to inspect the feathery ferns surging upward from the hidden forest floor. What humans inevitably fail to notice is that this profusion of life grows from an equal profusion of death lying upon the forest floor, the leaves decomposing in wondrous squalor, the many forest animals curled in their death pose just beneath the dirt, the bones of prey, the dirt that was once animal now feeding plants. Without this death, the forest would cease to exist. Death is always first and foremost the predecessor of life.

But none of this quite answers the question that began this post: Why do humans sometimes crave death? Could it indeed be some instinctual acknowledgment that death is the prerequisite for life? That idea pops up regularly throughout human thought. Freud postulated such a knowledge, relegating it to the subconscious mind (where he put most of the more interesting human impulses) and naming it the Death Impulse. He theorized that this death impulse resulted in people turning their inherent, animal violence inward upon themselves. If people allowed their inherent violence to express itself outward, they would not be able to live in a cooperative culture. Sublimating violence did not dispel our need to act violently, so from time to time our violence erupts. Since we don't let it out, the violence turns inward; we harm ourselves and so we end up seeking to destroy ourselves. Presumably, what motivates all this violence in the first place is a deep, secret knowledge that death is the most important thing for sustaining life.

Bataille disagrees. He wouldn't deny that humans harbor an innate impulse to violence. However, he said that our impulse toward violence has more to do with our divided nature than our involvement in cooperative culture. (He promised to write about our divided nature in a future epistle.) We crave death sometimes because death is the only movement that promises to release us from the world of things. (You will probably need to recall the discussion of the world of things from the last post for this to make sense.)

The world of things, which was opened up by our use of tools and our passionate embracing of the world of work, had a monumental consequence for humans: it made things out of us. Our value became equivalent to the value of things, of tools. Our value rested in the work we could do, and the value of work was always deferred. We lost our sovereignty. We lost our inherent value, the value of a sacred object. Consider a cross hanging on the wall. What is its value? Nothing, in the terminology of work. The cross performs no labor. Yet there it hangs upon the wall, the resources that went into its construction (including the labor of the humans who made it) wasted in a useless display. Yet the cross has a value of another kind--it carries a sacred value beyond the use-value of work. Its sacred character renders it sovereign, inherently and ontologically valuable. Human beings crave that very same value. We want to cease being things, as the cross has ceased being a thing, and we want instead to share in the sacred mystery that carries the cross's true value.

This is not about religion--the sacred is not necessarily equal to the religious. Religion just serves as a quick and easy example of the sacred. Bataille has threatened to write many, many epistles about the character of what is sacred.

Anyway. We crave to know the value of the cross as our own value. We desire the value animals, in their ignorance of work, know of themselves--a value that is at once both unquestionably valuable and worthless, a value that does not participate in the concept of value as it exists in the world of work. A value that is sacred.

And it is death that liberates us from the world of work. It is death that delivers us from being things, delivering us unto a sacred domain. Death provides a pivotal moment, in which our discontinuity from the world cracks apart, and in one brilliant expenditure of energy we cease being discontinuous, alone, and we become one with the world bodily. Our discontinuous self ceases to live in this world. Modern Christianity preaches the existence of a discontinuous, singular self of a soul living into immortality. Bataille doesn't think much of that--he is, after all, a fallen priest. Or rather, a man who graduated from seminary only to lose his faith and turn to theory and philosophy. But I hope the religious set doesn't hold that against him--he was, after all, able to delve into an entire world of thought forbidden to men of the cloth: the world of the body, which no philosopher before Marice Merleau-Ponty could bring himself to address.

So the attraction of death is really the desire to return to a lost sovereignty, to liberate ourselves from the world of things. I am, of course, butchering his pretty words and his well-crafted arguments, trying to distill such a long piece of work into tiny essentials. Elsewhere, Georges B. offers no less than two additional reasons underlying our desire for death. He may just have another one in the works. I offer this one because it strikes me as original and insightful. Plus, I'm just so damned happy to be getting his letters.

The whys of fearing death

Georges Bataille writes in this week to let me know why human beings fear death while animals don't. If you have a pet, you're probably thinking, "My Snookums is afraid of dying. One time he sniffed a dead chipmunk and I had to wipe away his tears." Well, to be honest, nobody--apart from the occasional animal psychic--knows what animals do or don't fear. But the key is that animals demonstrate no sign of fear. A typical animal reaction to a corpse is a brief sniff followed by moving along. Elephants seem to visit the occasional boneyard, but again, nobody knows what they're thinking during those visits.

Consider also the complete lack of evidence that animals deal with death. Then consider the abundant evidence of human beings' obsession with death: stone monuments, appeals to posterity, family trees, art, legacies, inheritance. I could go on.

Why this anxiety? What keeps human beings from surrendering to death without the pomp and ritual? My Buddy Georges B. suggests that death threatens everything that distinguishes human beings from the animals--namely, work.

The world of work, the entering of which marked the moment when the animals we were began the transformation into the humans we are, creates a world of things. These things are the tools we use in our work. The tool in itself has no value--neither does the act of labor itself. Nothing is pleasing about the act of labor in itself. Yet we labor anyway, for we desire the benefits to come, the pleasure that the act of labor defers. We work now to rest at the finish of our work, and at that point also to enjoy the thing we have made. Only at that point can we enjoy the fruits of our labor in a sovereign manner. Nowadays, we rarely enjoy the thing we have labored to make; rather, we enjoy the paycheck our labor earns. If we're very lucky, we get to enjoy the paycheck in a sovereign manner--spending without thought to the use or value of the money.

All value in the world of work is deferred value--it depends for its meaning on some future point that, paradoxically, almost never arrives. For when does our work end? When do we as humans become valuable just because of who we are? When does our value become independent of the labor we do, the contribution we make to society or to our family? When can we sit, and loaf, and slack, and be valuable nonetheless?

In the world of work, never.

Yet death ends the future upon which the world of work depends. Death cuts off the enjoyment of the fruits of our labor. Death kicks down the door and grabs us by the collar and laughs at our attempts to defer value. Death chops off the future, and the value, and renders us into the horror of objecthood, an empty body. That horror is inconceivable to a mind brought up within the world of work. That horror betrays everything the world of work had promised us. That horror betrays our humanity, which had its inception in the taking up of tools, in our entering the world of work.

If death so betrays us, if death presents such a horror to us, why do we sometimes crave it?

Bataille promised to write about that in his next epistle. I am chewing the walls with anticipation.

On the Origin of Image and Consciousness

We all have been born into a curious world. Already here by the time I arrived were such wonders as color television, grocery stores, language, and the atomic bomb. This world’s teeming exuberance displays itself everywhere: Traffic signs instruct me, radios scream for my attention, posters display moody scenes from the latest round of blockbuster movies, birds sing. In the window of a dentist’s office, newly whitened teeth grin from a happy mouth, while in the park across the street someone rides a silver scooter. Squirrels chatter. People on TV suggest I should treat myself to hamburgers and electronics. Everything disappears into this fog, and everything emerges from it in turn, seizing me.

What chance does consciousness stand in all this mess?

I want to go back. I want the time before television and radio, before posters and professional athletes. Way back there is a time when the world human beings had managed to make was no more than a tiny scrap overlaid upon the larger, more chaotic earth. Those humans were born into an earth with more animals than tools. Walking between villages that were always remote, people might not see a single thing made by human hands for days at a time. The only trappings of civilization were what they could carry.

But even that time is too late. I want to go further back, before there were any tools at all, when there was no world. Only the earth. Strictly speaking, we were not even human yet. We walked through an undifferentiated earth. What we saw was a collection of blurs, perhaps, or a seething morass of the inarticulate, the unarticulated. There was not yet speech, not yet language. I struggle to portray such a world in language, to use language as a tool for discussing non-language. Maybe it can’t be done. But try. Imagine what a weasel sees in a continuous flow of sense input, the world received mutely, unregistered and most likely unremembered. Perhaps we catch a whiff of this world when we’re driving and someone abruptly pulls into our lane. We swerve without thinking, yet somehow we aim our car to an empty patch of road. Now subtract the moment of relief, leaving only the pounding heart, the way oxygen suddenly acquires a taste, as every part of our sensory apparatus attunes itself more closely to the world, obliterating our rational filters and leaving us with only two abilities, to fight or flee. In the world to which I’m trying to return, we wouldn’t remember our near-miss. It would leave the moment we sniffed food, or sex. Don’t realize that death is coming; don’t understand anything at all about time. There is only the haze of the moment.

Eventually, perhaps by the engine of evolution or the grace of some god, differentiation began to resolve the earth. The haze clarified into an image, or we focused onto some patch of the haze and determined that there was, for instance, a rock. We sniffed at this new thing first, of course. The nose receives the world most purely, with just a thin membrane between the particles we smell and the brain making sense of them. We had not yet forgotten the acuity of the nose. What was that thing? What made it different from everything else?

I like to imagine that the source of images lurks there, in that moment of differentiation. Because once the rock was a thing, distinct from the rest of the haze, an explosion of insight was sure to follow. There were, for instance, other things under the rock. The haze began ceaselessly to resolve into things, and to this day it continues to resolve down to things we can’t even see.

Soon these things needed a name. Images showed us the way to language. The image of the rock, differentiated from the haze, sitting at the base of a tree, allowed us to see the tree. The tree allowed us to see bark and leaves, soil and sky. I wonder if our first words were nouns, if we began our long journey to worshiping things by honoring them with names.

When did we see fit to seize control of these things by describing them? When did we inscribe hardness on the rock, or height upon the tree?

Only much later, when we had managed to find ways of using the rock as a weapon or a hammer, did we discover work. And just as the rock showed us the tree, this thing called work showed us another thing: time. After all, we work in order to benefit ourselves at some point in the future. Work gives nothing in the moment of working, and its fruits can be enjoyed only when the work is finished. Suddenly we posited a moment not happening right now, a moment we would eventually inhabit. Nothing could stop that moment from coming; time would always call us to reckoning. And once we began looking into this strange new thing called the future, we inevitably saw all the way, to the end of the future, to our own death. It waited for us as it waited for the animals we ate, as it waited on the forests that burned.

Perhaps image and language are the source of human consciousness, and differentiation the source of them both. We indulged an ultimate hubris when we began dragging things out of the earth and bringing them into our world. Differentiation had one final, vicious turn for us: we also were things, called suddenly to take our place in the pantheon of things. How cruel to become conscious of ourselves as things in a world of things. We have never resolved that dilemma; it haunts every one of us, the price of our hubris.

This consciousness demands that we think, drags our thoughts inevitably back to ourselves. Bringing with it our awareness of our own death, our anxieties about being merely things, perhaps it’s no wonder that we flee from consciousness. The blockades we throw before consciousness draw upon an infinite power, which is our fear and self-loathing. A cruel irony lurks in our use of images to keep consciousness back when it is images that ushered us into consciousness.

However, we too easily forget that consciousness can only be held at bay. The future holds something even more terrifying and wonderful than our own death; it promises a moment when consciousness will break its tethers and stand before us, in the quiet hours after midnight, commanding our attention to bear upon everything we have ignored. Commanding us to know ourselves, yet incapable of offering a way to know ourselves.

Lost and afraid, we ask, what is the way?

indexing the rapture

Here's the fantastic spawn of calculative thinking and religion. Check out The Rapture Index . It's the "prophetic speedometer of end-time activity." My favorite is category 29, Liberalism, and the note further down the page which explains that the number is high because liberals have taken a huge beating recently. Thump your bible 200 times for armeggedon.

The gang's all here

Welcome three new members to the crit-theory blog: Hegel's Owl, lion cub, and Jen. Keep an eye out for the Mission Statement, coming soon. This thing is on the verge.

The child

What seethes here is the triumph of the earth, the withholding of meaning scarred only by these words. More posts will follow, and the possibilities will be narrowed steadily.