What was Batallie all about? I see his name with D&G sometimes and wonder if reading him further is worthwhile in terms of leftist thought.
Georges Bataille
Asher Long
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Camden Harris
the only things I know about him are:
1) he was highly influenced by Nietzsche
2) he wrote some weird-ass fetish porn novel
3) this quote
Seems like an interesting writer to check out, but worthwhile specifically for leftism, idk
Daniel Nguyen
Jackson Hill
So he wrote this book called the Accursed Share. The Accursed Share refers to that part of society which cannot be productive. Bataille is here putting extravagance and wastefulness at the heart of society. For (soon to be post-)leftists, the value of his work is in the moving beyond the leveling down of everything to the discourse of production of which Marxism has historically been guilty. The theory of the Accursed Share went on to be important to Baudrillard, who took Bataille as one of his core references.
Both Baudrillard and Bataille built on the work of Marcel Mauss, who was an anthropologist (and the nephew of Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology (along with Marx of course)) who wrote about gift exchange and its importance in pre-modern societies. One core reference is to the Potlach ceremony, where tribes or individuals would compete to see who can give the biggest gift. The person or group who can waste the most wins, because their extravagance and excessive waste give them symbolic potency.
Transitioning toward the modern world, you can see something like this at work in the high heel. Wearing high heeled shoes makes you vulnerable (can't run) and (likely) uncomfortable. Of course, it makes you taller, but arguably people can make a statement just by wearing them: "I don't need to defend myself to be safe, I am protected" for example. If high heels are in some way taken to be a symbol of women's submission to men or men's tastes, it could also be saying "I can be stereotypical in this way because I don't need to assert my agency like this. I have other ways." Similarly, "making it rain" in the club shows you are powerful because you can "waste" so much money without thinking about it. The accursed share is basically the theory that all of society revolves around these displays of excessive waste.
I think this is useful because the Marxist paradigm is limited. What is to be done is debatable, but what theorists like Bataille (and Baudrillard who is bae to me) are missing within Marxism is the consideration of humanity's wasteful side, all that is missed out on in the theory of homo economicus. From a Marxist perspective, the bourgeoisie at least are a self-conscious class and act on their own best interest.
The theory of the accursed share problematizes the concept of interests, since it describes social life as defined by those gestures which are outside of rational interests. You can try to bring up how these ritual displays are still cynical ploys aimed at status games and other productivist ends within society, but this does not explain self-destructive acts of excess, like suicide and hopeless warfare. These gestures (and many others) put the lie to the discourse of production and rational calculation of interests.
This is important for leftists to hear because for too many, the works of Marx are the horizon for critical thought. Theorists like Bataille help us to start thinking about what production and political economy means, from a social perspective defined by gestures of excess rather than rationalizing scarcity. Fundamentally this is pointing to the inadequacy of Marxist theory when it comes to death and radical skepticism, huge sources of indeterminacy which undermine Marxist rationalism.
Luke Mitchell
ubu.com
Documentary, 47 min. French with English subs.
Christian Gray
The fact that you need economic surplus to carry out the second one implies that economic production is primary. What do you mean by hopeless war? Are you implying that imperialist wars are irrational spoiler alert: they aren't or that certain acts like the Kamikaze in WWII aren't rational? From the national-economic perspective, continuing to fight a losing war can be beneficial since it means you can negotiate a surrender or settlement from a position of relative strength rather than complete weakness; for say the Kamikaze pilot protecting their nation-state might be associated with protecting their families and friends and ruling classes have worked hard to produce and maintain this association.
Let's return to the question of "excessive waste" let us look at the consumption of the capitalist, for instance. Consider that Volume II, actually maintains that capitalist luxury consumption is a necessary part of the system–why might this be? For the same reason that workers typically don't buy bulldozers for recreational use–only capitalists have the money to buy certain types of items, especially in large quantities.
What you call "productivism" is actually a vulgarization of economics–mainly by the critics of so-called "productivism" themselves. For instance, can there be any doubt that if the capitalist wasn't materially compensated for fulfilling his social role as a capitalist that he might not go to the trouble of fulfilling this role? Doesn't the compensation necessarily have to be greater than that of the average worker (on average) or wouldn't it end up that he has little to lose from socialism or would simply be better off making a living as an average worker?
However, it seems there are those who think that the very fact that capitalists don't reinvest every dollar they earn is an irrationality. If such a thing were to occur wouldn't the market be overflooded with with capital causing low-returns and an epic crisis? Then actually contrary to your critique waste and/or abstaining from production is actually rather rational besides the fact that spending money on personal desires fulfills use-values, however frivolous. A capitalist with a heroin addiction may shorten his life but this is no matter as long as he fulfills his social role while he still lives. Besides being a highly-profitable activity like recreational drug-use or gambling often does fulfill some unmet need resulting from the social misery of capitalist society. The physiological pleasure caused by drugs are their own end but numerous studies show that people who are miserable take and rely on them more.
"Moral depreciation" and capitalism's ever-growing productivity actually create rational reasons to encourage wastefulness. I mean its first day leftist stuff to point out that consumerism and planned obsolescence play a role in keeping profitable prices in place and capitalism humming along.
As for suicide, it is usually a result of social misery and I don't see much case for making it a primary end of analysis. It's a mistake to think that Marxism posits that everything happens is rational but from the point of view of the system a few dead proles is no real loss and when it comes to ending personal suffering, suicide does actually work.
Quite apart from the fact that such tribes operate under quite different economic laws than capitalist or other types of class-society, have you ever considered that the purpose of the potlach and gift-giving culture is actually to put a break on inequality? Even a hack like Graeber gets that right.
Likewise, feasting certainly wasn't irrational when food storage options were limited and people needed fat stores to make it through lean seasons.
Christian Hill
I'd also like to add that the presence of wastefulness and sloth among certain segments of the petit-bourgeoisie almost certainly shows that post-leftists are wrong in attributing to these impulses any type of revolutionary anti-capitalist potential. I'd even go farther that given fact that capitalists, petit-bourgeois and lumpen alike dedicate their lives to living at the expense of the rest of society reveals that these impulses do not by themselves promote human freedom.
Nor are these things even conducive to human happiness in excess. Contrast the misery of the unemployed (even when they have access to relatively generous benefits) versus the state of people who actually have jobs. Many studies show that people are often happier when their working than even when they are leisure.
The idea that communism will be a planetary version of the Axiom by Wall-E is actually somewhat dystopian even if its advocates fail to realize it.
Hudson Jackson
*in Wall-E
Colton Lopez
ooh boy
If this is a crime in your eyes you need to take histmat101.
Marx 'was not the founder of sociology for he did not do sociology. You might say he influenced the discipline, but he'd himself protest being called one. Again, this is 101-tier.
versobooks.com
You might think you can, most people might think they can, and most of you might even practice it, believing that by wearing a shoe you convey your own infantile fantasies about what a product says about you, but the only real content of your message, the only thing on display is commodity fetishism.
Yet you have only portrayed that you have not the basic understanding of that very paradigm. Nothing you said so far could not be covered by Marxism.
Capital pretty much covers it.
This is wrong on so many levels. First, it is factually incorrect, second, you are conflating class-consciousness with self-consciousness, third, even after that correction you are still wrong.
Thanks for enlightening us, but before speaking about Marx, educating us on him, maybe consider reading him.
Nolan Gutierrez
This reminds me of Rebel.
Xavier Howard
It cannot be so, since the first humans evolved out of a pre-economic framework. In order for there to be such thing as economy, there must be the creature which has the potential to actualize it. Labor had no hand in the creation of the conditions of possibility of humans, therefore economic production cannot be primary in the arising of human society. I know that Marx already wrote that not all value comes from labor, but also from the material world. The problem is that the material world, categorized as "nature," is reduced in these terms to objects defined by their economic utility. So, if you take economic production to be primary because it gives rise to the conditions of possibility of warfare, what gives rise to the conditions of possibility of production?
nope
good points, I spoke to soon on the whole warfare angle.
Tautological. The capitalist must be doing what is in their interest since if it weren't in their interest they wouldn't be doing it. Your underlying assertion is that people do things for the sake of production goals. The problem is that utility is judged based on fittedness to individual and social needs. These cannot be rigorously defined because purpose is not a brute fact.
Of course capitalists turn a profit… The point here though is, what is driving this behavior? Even if the capitalist is building the ultimate profit, what does he win- immortality, taking over the universe, incorporating everything into himself… for what purpose? The perspective I'm sharing here is that it has something to do with the pleasure of humiliating others, not some objective principle. In the end, capitalist means wind up overrunning their ends, showing that capitalism can't be based on stable processes. If the workings of production change what production means, how can production be a fundamental term?
If even the societal winners are driven to drug use by the hundreds of thousands, where does the impetus come from to create capitalism in the first place? The logic of accumulation is not rational on an individual level because of the problem of death. Therefore, there must be ideological identification going on whereby capitalists conceive of themselves as part of a social body, a class. So where does this class consciousness come from, if its implications extend beyond the grave? Self-destructive activities undermine the logic of production since through them, the subject is actively attacking their own material conditions; yet on your view they can remain part of a rational system where their behavior is benefitting the rest of their class. It's contradictory for a person to be oriented toward their own material destruction and the material prosperity of others. Their drive toward profit must then be seen as another form of addiction. My contention would then be that class consciousness can't really exist since consciousness must lead to the negation of classification as a form of alienation which is opposed to rationality.
Anthony Peterson
The question is not what productive purpose wastefulness serves, but rather what superfluous concerns are addressed by the system of production. This is easily summarized through appeal to Hume's correct quote that reason is the slave of the passions. Marxism simply takes for granted the utility of power, domination, profit, and accumulation. But what purpose is this serving? And tease it out a few thousand years… is the problem that at any time capitalists are simply oriented toward improving their position a little bit from where they are, under the present terms? Marx certainly didn't overlook quantitative -> qualitative change, but the implication here is that capitalist ideology is never coherent under its own terms. Since capitalists by definition detroy the conditions which make their work possible, they destroy any basis for collective identity which could ground a class consciousness which even then would still be a humanized version of the body of Christ.
We should talk more about life and death, otherwise we get so caught up in the drama of life that we forget it all takes place in the backdrop of indeterminacy.
How do you know it works lmao? Pray tell what happens after you die, can't wait to put this matter to bed.
Suicide is structurally an important problem because the entirely theory of the bourgeoisie is of it as a suicidal class (indirectly by creating the proletariat), and the proletariat even more so (killing the concept of class itself). It is the very inability of socialists to suicide their own concepts which holds them back. As Marx discusses, it's important to move happily on from the past, in order words to commit suicide and leave a pretty corpse instead of hopelessly fighting fatal cancer. Marxism gestures toward the overcoming of the present mode of economic production and valuation, but this suggests that our current framework is ontologically inadequate even now. Acknowledging this removes the pressure to defend word fortresses which are fatally flawed.
But what's the purpose of limiting inequality? It certainly didn't turn out so great for those tribes, they just got fucked up by a different tribe in the end anyways. The question is what gives life value to these people? The answer does not have to be material security, because people can be aware of their life as an interaction with the cosmic unknown as opposed to a well-defined set of economic relationships.
William Gomez
Do you mean the rebel by Camus? Love that book why you hate it?
Gavin Williams
Yep, it's Rebel. Abandon thread.
Carson Lee
Is that who I'm supposed to be? Confusion rising
Austin Mitchell
Oh I see there's a person called Rebel Absurdity. Not me fammo
Blake Robinson
The pseud is back.
Landon Miller
Side note: Georges Bataille's philosophy inspired Martyrs, which was one of the best horror movies of the modern era.
Gavin Ross
Every living being has an economic life in the strictest sense. Birds build nests, ants carry and stack up food, fungi unbuild a dead tree and move onto another, amoebae regulate their osmotic pressure dependent on their surrounding.
You speak of a "creature" separate and predating its economy, a life separate from its environment; an impossibility, a sophist's trickery.
Life's capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change are economic in nature and do have utility for the organism.
What makes and defines man is his capacity for conscious activity, and not, as you argue against ghosts of your own, a beginning of economic activity tout court.
As always, Rebel.
No, you are missing a point and keep on arguing against your own misunderstandings and constructions.
I'm done with you.
Side note: the typical Rebel thread involves several unrelated bumps by him.
Liam Price
I have no idea who rebel is or why you're sperging out about him.
Evan Foster
Not even the guy you're replying to, but you're really really dumb and should stop doing posts like this.