Gary, I see you’ve been captivated by Bataille’s early writings on the eye and how these writings may represent an anti-Cartesian and even anti-Platonic approach to philosophy. It made me think of an essay I wrote a few years ago, actually four days after the famous September 11 event, although as far as I know it had nothing to do with that event. The essay briefly considers Roland Barthes’ essay on Story Of The Eye. Foucault also considers the book in ‘A Preface To Transgression’, which appears in a number of places, eg, Aesthetics.
On the topic of the role of vision in western thought, I was interested in your recent post on the windowless monad, in which you seem to suggest that Adorno’s thinking was rather like that of Bataille. The idea is that the relation of artworks to one-another is one of blindness. In Adorno’s words, they are ‘hermetically closed off and blind, yet in their isolation [they] represent the outside world.’ (You didn’t give a source.) Artworks ‘lead to the universal by virtue of their principle of particularisation.’
It seems to me that Klossowski provided a detailed account of this process in terms of the phantasm’s struggle with the stereotype. No doubt there are alternative explanations that are also useful.
Anyway, all this is just a poorly organised thought. What has always struck me is the closeness between Adorno’s and Bataille’s thought.
Here is me old essay on Barthes on Bataille:
Seeing Eye To Eye With Roland Barthes
* Pages numbers in brackets refer to Barthes’ article, if preceded by a ‘B’ they refer to Bataille’s book.
In the late 1960s, Calder and Boyars were prosecuted by the British government for obscenity because they published Hubert Selby’s book, Last Exit To Brooklyn. It was not until a second appeal that they were finally acquitted, so when Marion Boyars decided to publish George Bataille’s notorious pornographic work, Story Of The Eye she included two essays by distinguished critics in the hope that it would help in dissuading the censors from any thought of action. The Penguin edition, which appeared in 1982, contained the same content as the Calder and Boyars edition. One of the articles is by Susan Sontag. This essay, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’ deals with the question of pornography generally and argues for two distinct forms, one of which is artistic. The essay identifies Bataille as the leading representative of this latter genre. The other essay is by Roland Barthes and concentrates upon Story Of The Eye. It is this essay that I want to discuss here.
In a way that I will soon describe, Barthes approached Bataille from the perspective of style. Sontag noted that pornography of the artistic kind has a particular form. She quoted Adorno as suggesting that it is without beginning or end and does not contain the usual development and dramatic build-up of many other literary forms, such as the modern novel. This lack of definite beginning or end is precisely the characteristic of Story Of The Eye that Barthes found to be so central to his reading; in fact, he wrote of the book’s rhetorical structure being circular. Instead of a high point, it simply contains different points. Schematically, both pornography in general and Story Of The Eye in particular are of the following structure: ‘At one point during the sexual activity something in particular took place … and then the activity moved on to something else’.
In Story Of The Eye this basic structure is given a powerful poetic expression through an interplay of two interconnecting sets or series of metaphors, that of the eye and that of liquid. It is the results generated by this rhetorical play that give the novel its erotic character, according to Barthes. After I have described Barthes’ interpretation I would like to take up this point, which seems to be to be unwarrantedly abstract and formal in its conception. I will argue that the erotic character of Bataille’s book is also dependent on the pre-existing meanings of the terms employed. It is the relationship between this meaning and the book’s rhetorical style that is responsible for the specific erotic aura of Story Of The Eye.
Barthes could be seen as approaching Bataille’s book as a dialectician, for rather than employing that analytic machinery of surrealism as it has been formalised by post-modernists in terms of concepts like the simulacrum, he approached it in terms of literary polarity. But while he employed a dialectical method with one hand, he discarded it with the other, ultimately arguing for a purely formal interpretation as the only one admissible in this case. This led him to suggest that Bataille’s eroticism is but a consequence of technique.
The novels of the Marquis de Sade provided the foil against which Barthes was to counter pose as a strange kind of erotic prose-poem, Story Of The Eye tells the tale of an object rather than a person, an object that passes from image to image in a kind of migration, ‘far removed from its original being, down the path of a particular imagination that distorts but never drops it’. It is not simply a tale of an object that changes hands however and does not belong to that genre described by Barthes as a type of romantic imagination confined to arranging reality. What he called the ‘avatars’ in Bataille’s story, those earthly emanations of the divine, are completely imaginary and totally at odds with reality. While the novel form ‘makes do with a partial, derived, impure make-believe (mixed up with reality)’, Bataille’s story invokes ‘essence of make-believe’, a characteristic of poet expression. The novelist's imagination is probable, the poet's improbable. Poetic content can only ever exist in the realm of fantasy. While novels proceed by chance combinations of ‘real elements’, poems involve a ‘precise and complete exploration of virtual elements’ (p. 120).
Not satisfied by simply identifying of the opposing poles of novel and poem, Barthes proceeded to analyse Bataille’s story in terms of a number of linguistic and literary categories, which he arranged in dialectical oppositions: arrangement and selection, syntagma and paradigm, and metonymy and metaphor. The antecedents of all three dialectical pairs are related, as are the consequents: one is the path of arrangement, the orderly progression of statements, a transfer of meaning, the other of selection, of exemplars and particularly striking examples, of figures of speech that are not strictly applicable. How does all of this go together to provide Story Of The Eye with its particular erotic effect or aura?
Bataille’s book is surrealist in style, his notion of metaphor drawing on the ‘surrealist image as formulated by Reverdy and echoed by Breton.’ Reverdy’s principle was that ‘the more remote and right the relations between the two realities, the more powerful will be the image’ (p. 125). Barthes’ argument is that Bataille created this power of image through his metonymic manipulation of metaphor. Story Of The Eye utilises two chains of recurring metaphor, the eye and liquid, which are combined to great effect in a process further strengthened by a process of transference of meaning from one metaphorical level to another.
The object that is the subject of the book is the Eye, not an eye; an abstract rather than a concrete object. Barthes identified a number of fictional objects that represented the Eye, objects that were all similar in being globular, but also dissimilar in their uniqueness. This combination of similarity and dissimilarity is the necessary and sufficient condition for a paradigm. The first representation of the Eye is a saucer of milk in which Simone, the main female character squats. ‘Milk is for the pussy, isn’t it?’ says Simone (B p. 4) as she immerses her genitalia in the liquid. Another representation is the rear wheel of the bicycle that seemingly vanishes into the crevice of Simone’s backside (p. 32). Among such associations are a matador’s eyes torn out by a bull and a priest’s eye, which is inserted into Simone’s vagina. The eye of the narrator, which features in a number of scenes, is but another representation of the Eye. Such associations represent what Barthes called a ‘chain of metaphors’. In a literary sense, the chain of substitutes of the Eye decline throughout the tale, advancing like propositions of equal meaning, successive moments of the story of both endurance and variation (pp. 121-2). Whiteness and/or roundness provide for a declension of metaphors: a saucer of milk, the back wheel of a bicycle, eggs, particularly the yokes of soft-boiled eggs, a bulls’ testicles, the eye of a matador, the eye of a priest, the sun, the blind eyes of the father, the narrator’s need to see up the vagina.
The book’s other metaphorical chain involves liquid or liquefaction and is represented by a saucer of cat’s milk, by sweat, by steam, by sperm, urine, tears, and blood – the bowels of a gored horse spilled ‘“like a cataract” from its side’ (p. 122), even the sun’s light flowed like a liquid, providing a ‘soft luminosity’ and ‘urinary liquefaction of the sky’ (B p. 65). Another strikingly unusual case of liquefaction is ‘the milky way, that strange breach of astral sperm and heavenly urine … that open crack at the summit of the sky … a broken egg, a broken eye’ (B. p. 48). The sun is round and wet, hard-boiled eggs submerged in a toilet bowl are round and wet, an eye is round and wet, urine splashes on the eye of the narrator as he lies between Simone’s legs.
The power of Story Of The Eye comes neither from beauty nor novelty but is solely a consequence of rhetorical technique. It is ‘a kind of open literature out of the reach of all interpretation, one that only formal criticism can – at a great distance – accompany’ (p. 124). Metaphor cannot constitute a discourse on its own, however. Recounting its terms within a narrative structure forces paradigmatic elements to give way to syntagmatic developments. A paradigm is a kind of an infection that becomes an over-riding idea or image – Barthes suggested the example of soft-boiled eggs – but once stated a paradigm can only be reiterated and repetition does not constitute a story. Story of the Eye derives its narrative structure from the different combinations of its intertwining metaphorical series. In fact, Barthes maintained that the story itself is essentially an outcome of the need to express the inter-related metaphors in novel ways. For instance, a park at night is introduced ‘in order that the moon can emerge from the clouds to shine on the wet stain in the middle of Marcelle's sheet as it flaps from the window’ (p. 124), the visit to a bullfight is to extend the metaphorical play to a bull’s testicles and a horse’s intestines, the suicide of Marcelle to extend the metaphors to dead eyes that are urinated upon, and so on. The narrative is very restricted in this way, a feature that is much more characteristic of a poem than a novel.
Because the two chains continually touch interchanges are possible, the coupling a term from one metaphor with a term from the other, thus eyes weep, broken eggs run, light pours through the window, and so on. Bataille’s metaphorical couplings draw on moments everybody shares; Barthes described them as ‘ancestral stereotypes’ (p. 125). Bataille destroys traditional affinities, however. Instead of breaking eggs and putting out eyes, he writes of breaking eyes and putting out eggs. The images lie somewhere between the banal and the absurd but they are neither mad nor free images. In Barthes’ words, ‘In accordance with the law that holds that literature is never more than its technique, the insistence and freedom of this song are the products of an exact art that has succeeded in both measuring the associative field and freeing within it the contiguities of terms’ (p. 126), a process metonym as its organising principle. Thus the book contains expressions such as that of an ‘eye sucked like a breast,’ and ‘drinking my left eye between her lips.’ Bataille’s poetic technique utilises the single theme of each metaphor, so that:
by virtue of their metaphorical dependence eye, sun, and egg are closely bound up with the genital; by virtue of their metonymic freedom they endlessly exchange meanings and usages in such a way that breaking eggs in a bath tub, swallowing or peeling eggs (soft-boiled), cutting up or putting out an eye or using one in sex play, associating a saucer of milk with a cunt or a beam of light with a jet of urine, biting the bull's testicle like an egg or inserting it in the body (p. 126).
As a result, properties are combined and urination, ejaculation, tears and slopping share meaning through what Barthes has called ‘a technical transgression of the forms of language’ (pp. 126-7), the metonymy underlies syntagma, bringing about a ‘counter-division of objects, usages, meanings, spaces, and properties that is eroticism itself’ (p. 127).
In the one-dimensionality of Barthes’ analysis lies both its strengths and its weaknesses. His singular concentration on the stylistic qualities of Bataille’s prose-poem – the play of metaphor and metonym drawing paradigmatic expressions into syntagmatic associations – not only brings to the fore its peculiar and illusive literary properties but it also provides details of the role played by rhetorical style in modes of pornographic expression, effectively fleshing out Sontag’s observation. But like the logical positivists, he abandoned metaphysics in pursuit of his aims. As a result, nothing can be said about the role or reason for sexual activity in Bataille’s story; indeed he thinks that it is illegitimate to even ask such questions. In ‘A Preface To Transgression’, an essay on Bataille, Michel Foucault argued that it is not so much that sex finds a language of its own in pornography but rather that language does violence to sex, limiting its capacity to point beyond itself. This accusation could be justifiably levelled at Barthes in as much as his formalist account suppresses all such concerns. But doesn’t the Eye get its real meaning, its essential meaning from Bataille’s attempt to see beyond sex. If Catherine Breillat is right that sex is the doorway to the transcendental, then could Bataille’s Eye be seeking to look through this doorway? Isn’t this the real meaning of the book. Is it not this metaphysical idea that gives meaning and urgency to the books style? If the style of Story Of The Eye pushes beyond language – which seems an impossibility but Bataille was always in pursuit of impossibilities – this act gains purpose only through metaphysics. It cannot be reduced to a meaningless formalism.