Lets face it. Bataille is boring. Dead boring. Boring because he is such an individualist.
For a far more sympathetic and insightful reading of Bataille, see Joe's earlier post here.
Boring is my reaction, even though I try to get in the mood by reading him late at night in the bowls of the Canberra political machine at the end of a long day, with Sky News on endless repeat. Is there any other way to read Bataille?
Believe me, though Canberra is a world of mesmerizing surfaces, seductively addictive but depthless, it is also a very existential experience full of fear, despair, terror and death. The machineryof power and spectacle can crush you, and many have been. There are bodies everywhere. People hug the walls avoiding your eyes, pretending your bodily existence is nothing, as they walk past you in the corridors. Once they were your friends. Now they are hurt, wounded and full of shame. People become shadows of their former self due to losing an election. All that energy fighting is wasted. They feel wasted, tired, exhausted and depleted. Life has no meaning anymore.
On Nietzsche is all about Bataille alone and preoccupied with his inner experience. There is little conception of ethics involving self and other, or of belonging to a public world. With Bataille we are locked up in the world of Cartesian individualism, trapped in our subjectivity, romancing the passions, resisting normative moral systems and preoccupied with the relentless and useless emptying out of energy.
On Nietzsche is little more than a diary of an isolated individual dealing with his pain. One can be alone writing but in Canberra one knows that one is still a part of the machinery of political power, and that this power often works to easily extinquish you. However, Bataille fantasies that he is actually alone in the world, alone in the cosmos. It's mythmaking.
In Ch 13 of the 'Summit and Decline' section (part two) Bataille says:
"Making my inner experience a project:doesn't that result in a remoteness, on my part, from the summit that might have been?"
Ho hum. It reads like a Catholic confession without the priest.
In chapter 14 Bataille puts aside his desires for autonomy and his longings for freedom from a public powers (good old negative freedom) for more of a human autonomy at the heart of a hostile silent nature. He is alone with his terrors gripped by feelings of desperation and living at the limits.
So are those who inhabit the political world in Canberra. They are alone with the rollercoaster of emotion even though they are still part of the workings of political machine. So I can connect to Bataille's subjective processes of excess that threaten to overwhelm my ego and identity. I experience the terrors and feelings of desperation daily.
The terrors, being gripped by feelings of desperation and living at the limits are part of the every day political experience: the destructive chaotic impluses that threaten to overwhelm you are something that you just have to live with. You are living with death and wondering, is there life after politics?
So what does Bataille actually say before we turn to the diary proper?
This what he says-- and I'm going to give the space to say his bit since this text is not online:
"...while I can't get along without acting or questioning, on the other hand I am able to live---to act or question---without knowing. Perhaps the desire to know has just one meaning---as a motivation for the desire to question. Naturally, knowing is necessary for human autonomy procured through action by which the world is transformed. But beyond any conditions for doing or making, knowledge finally appears as a deception in relation to the questioning that impels it. When questioning fails, we laugh. Ecstatic raptures and ardors of love are so many questions---to which nature and our nature are subjected. If I had the ability to respond to moral questions like the ones I've indicated, to be honest, I'd be putting the summit at a distance from myself. By leaving open such questions in me like a wound, I keep my chance, I keep luck, and I maintain a possible access to these questions."
What kind of bullshit is that.
You only survive in the political machine through embodied political knowledge. That allows you to read the political power plays that can wipe you out. Many cannot read the body language as they---wearing the mask of the lobbyists wander through the building, going from appointment to appointment to persuading this person or that. The invisible play of power is circulating all around them but they never really see it. They are too caught up with up their own concerns. Though their (theoretical) knowledge of how Canberra works is deceptive, the tacit embodied knowledge of the play of power is what keeps you alive.
That kind of thinking works from the pre-choate and the quizzical gap; from the nagging tension and the razor sharpness of contradictary forces. The knowledge from this embodied thinking often takes place within empty places, and the voids that suddenly appear between the powerful conceptual schemes at work in the knowledge/power machinery. This kind of knowledge arises from the breakdown in the relationships between the individual concepts when things go bellyup.
So we live in a postmodern political world of fractured bundles of concepts (eg., ladder of opportunity) which become isolated in their shining splendour (eg., Medicare Gold) like so many galactic systems, and which drift apart (aspirational suburbanites) in the empty space of the political world.
Bataille writes: 'When questioning fails, we laugh.'
The questioning is a survival tool to negotiate the political sea full of icebergs. Questioning involves deciphering the appearances of the play of poweras refrated in the glittering surfaces of the media. It is not a question of the questioning failing, and then breaking out in laughter. The questioning and deciphering continue, as it is a part of living in a political life. Turn the questioning off and you die. And the laughter? That is thrown at you by the mocking victors, whilst the losers laugh their bitter death.
And the ecstatic raptures? That excess comes from victory, just as the terror comes from defeat. These, and the awful laughter, are built into the political life. It does not implode it.
As you can see I am not much impressed with G. Bataille, who wears the romantic mask of the artist/writer in On Nietzsche. He does not understand that the destructive process of the summit and decline (the informe?) which confuses the world of meaning and form with its clear-cut differences is the core of the political machine. It is how the political machine works.
So you can see why I find Bataille boring. It is all too close to the confessional.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 12, 2004 10:47 PM | TrackBack