A Response to Teresa L. Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh’s Critique of Georges Bataille

05/25/2021

In their great work Class in Culture, Teresa L. Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh do nothing less than provide a grand treatise on class and how it relates to culture… but they for some reason find it pertinent to bring up the work of Georges Bataille.

In his truly revolutionary essay, “The Stupidity that Consumption is Just as Productive as Production”: In the Shopping Mall of the Post-al Left, Zavarzadeh fights off bourgeois specters who are trying to distract us from the inner functions of capitalism. This essay’s importance doesn’t solely lay in the argument of the essay but in its invocation of this concept of ‘post-ality’. Zavarzadeh says that “[p]ost-al logic is marked above all by its erasure of ‘production’ as the determining force in organizing human societies and their institutions, and its insistence on ‘consumption’ and ‘distribution’ as the driving force of the social”.[1] Knowing this, when Erbert and Zavarzadeh say that “[a]ll post al theories of consumption are founded on the conservative views of Georges Bataille,” Batailleans should take this charge seriously and critique it with vigour.[2]

They say that Bataille’s theory “represents desire as the dynamics of culture and marginalizes labor”.[3] No claim makes me laugh more. Bataille sees desire as the desire for Being and that this is inherent to discontinuous beings. Desire has no relation to culture except maybe in relation to taboo.

They say that Bataille holds that “the most effective resistance to capitalist exchange relations is to crush their functional reciprocities through lavish consumption — expenditure without purpose”.[4] Ebert and Zavarzadeh, continuing with this presupposition, say that “Bataille’s theory of resistance to capitalism now dominates institutional theory, but it is actually more an affirmation of capital than an opposition to it”.[5]

Ebert and Zavarzadeh’s critique of Bataille is that through unproductive expenditure, one actually affirms capitalism. They give a few reasons for this:

1. “By giving consumption an aura of the sacred and representing it as a condition for sovereignty of the subject, he provides consumers for capitalism”.[6]
2. “Far from overthrowing capitalism, their expenditures actually fuel its markets”.[7]
3. “Bataille’s spiritualizing of consumption without purpose energizes the market to respond to the desire of the wealthy (supply their demands for luxuries guarantees superprofits) and ignore the needs of the indigent (whose demands are too mundane to produce more than a standard profit)”.[8]
4. “His call for consumption, in short, legitimizes supplying the most profitable over meeting the needs of the people”.[9]
5. “[H]is theory of resistance against capital, like all cultural resistance, is a local opposition that affirms capital in its global structure (wage-labor)”.[10]

Let’s start with these five and then move to the various other critiques they have in their book:

1. Starting with the first contention, we can see that there are already problems. The first problem is that if the subject is sovereign then it is NOTHING. This is problematic for Ebert and Zavarzadeh because if the subject is NOTHING, then it has achieved Being which is NOWHERE, and therefore, it no longer desires, it no longer consumes, as it is no longer an isolated being but a part of the totality. Thus, Bataille annihilates the possibility of consumers for capitalism.
2. The issue with Ebert and Zavarzadeh’s view of consumption is that it is too economic. Consumption isn’t exclusive to markets and commodities and the sheer fact that Ebert and Zavarzadeh implicitly hold this attests more to how they are stuck within capitalist logic than Bataille.
3. The issue with what they are putting forward is that it operates off the false presupposition that Bataille failed to separate the conspicuous consumption of the rich and unproductive consumption. But this is just not true by the fact that conspicuous consumption still has the ability to be productive and is thus not unproductive consumption.
4. Bataille would not support exalting the high (the bourgeoisie) over the base (the proletariat). The other glaring issue is that Bataille wouldn’t elevate the more profitable people over those who generate less or no profit, as to do this would be elevating the useful over the useless which is something Bataille would not do.
5. This is laughable. Really, it is like they never even read Bataille. Bataille sees work as servility par excellence, he hardly supports wage-labor.

Now onto some more critiques they throw at Bataille:

1. Ebert and Zavarzadeh argue that Bataille’s conception of matter “is a product of the mind emancipated from causality through gnosis”.[11]
2. “Marxist materialism for Bataille is a form of idealism because it is a strong conceptuality that produces laws of the social and turns dialectics into a science”.[12]
3. “Materialism, in this view, is not the ground of freedom from necessity but cultural freedom from fixed and functional meanings; it is access to the nomadic meanings repressed by the functional semantics of capitalism”.[13]
4. “What Bataille represents as materialism and uses to state the priority of consumption over production and argue for ‘nonproductive expenditure’ is a new spiritualism of commodities”.[14]
5. “Through a network of metaphors — the “horizontal,” the “vertical,” “expenditure,” “loss,” “sacrifice” — Bataille spiritualizes the material and turns it into a mystical medium that enables him to transform the objective, historical class relations shaping people’s actual lives into sacred intensitites”.[15]
6. “[H]is story of the horizontal and the vertical is a parable persuading the lowly and the humble to submit to the lofty and the powerful by teaching them to interpret their acquiescence — crawling on the ground — as a rebellion against the triumphalist authoritarian power rising above the world. His narrative of the horizontal is a pedagogy of submission. It teaches embracing the corporeal and the subterranean … and suspicion of the Icarian revolution and soaring imperial eagle”.[16]
7. Bataille opposes ‘revolutionary theory’ as a soaring, vertical, and utilitarian discourse and uses the ‘old mole’ to repeat the ideological psalm that solaces the poor and the powerless by reassuring them that their poverty is a form of richness and their weakness is itself power”.[17]
8. “Bataille reduces materialism to the materiality of the concrete expenditure without return — it is the means by which one can be freed from capitalist exchange relations without overthrowing the structural relations of production that produce commodities and the system of exchange”.[18]
9. “The goal of resistance to capitalism is not to overthrow wage labor or such other mundane material goals but to revive giving without return: generosity, extravagance, and prodigality. Bataille’s thought, thus, becomes more and more a performativity without concepts”.[19]
10. “His post economic society beyond production is a society of desire in which needs are vulgar residues of a non-aristocratic pragmatism. His cultural radicalism consists of opposition to capital and is aimed not at overthrowing but at bypassing circles of exchange. He is simply rearticulating and legitimating, in the theatrical vocabularies of sensual concrete rituals, the existing abstract system of calculation and trading wages for labor-power by which the exploitation of the many occurs through which the many provide the aristocratic culture of extravagance, prodigality, and exuberance for the few”.[20]
11. “The theoretical popularity of the gift and its interest for Mauss, Bataille, Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard is that it radically changes the relation of production and consumption because the gift suspends the circuit of exchange and establishes obligation. In other words, it transforms the economic into the ethical, renders the material as cultural, and replaces labor with the desires of the subject of the potlatch. The translation of the material into the cultural is the fundamental ideological work of capitalist cultural politics”.[21]
12. Ebert and Zavarzadeh argue that Bataille advocates for the theory of the potlatch which “is an ally of capital because by privileging honor and prestige, it cultivates the singularity of the subject and individualism”.[22]
13. “Expenditure as a means for acquiring a constantly shifting lifestyle (identity) is turned in Bataille’s writings into a guarantee of profit for capital … through prodigality and spectacle-expenditure, the consuming subject acquires the quality of subjectivity most valorized in Bataille: ‘sovereignty’ … Sovereignty is the sublime of expenditure, and the spiritual transcendence of the material. It is the acquisition of a symbolic wealth (honor, glory, play) that enables the subject to finally recognize that commodities are not objects but meanings, which are not created by production and fixed in the object’s use-value but rather are nomadic and producerly — invented by the consumer. Absolute consumption is conclusive sovereignty. The meaning of commodities, their symbolic value, is what … constitutes the basis for a resistance against capitalism”[23]
14. “[T]he ‘general economy,’ which includes not only commodities but also their excess and overflow of meanings”.[24]
15. “Production is subordinate to expenditure, which is another way of saying that what matters is not what is produced (labor) but the producerly: the meaning that the subject of consumption creates by consuming it”.[25]
16. “Bataille’s political theory is essentially an aesthetics grounded in the transgression against labor, denial of needs, and suspension of telos. It is a hybrid of capitalism and anarchism in which production loses its coherence and capitalism becomes disorganized and in which money becomes ‘a kind of free-floating signifier detached from real processes to which it once referred’”.[26]
17. “Bataille’s society of honor, glory, and sovereignty, which is represented as a progressive move against capitalism, is a post city without the urban proletariat. It is a reactionary attempt to cling to retrograde social relations of production idealized as an organic post economic community of gifts freed from the circuits of exchange, which is then said to be a radical critique of modernity and its productionism”.[27]
18. “Bataille’s de-historicizing of history as events of ‘sacrifice,’ ‘potlatch,’ and ‘loss’ is a familiar rewriting, or as Marx would say, a farcical return of this bourgeois fantasy which sees in the ‘post’ the return of the medieval village without the urban proletariat. Bataille’s desire to return to this post urban village of rituals of expenditure is a replat of Penty’s ‘true socialism.’”[28]
19. “Bataille, who regards himself to be a socialist but thinks of socialism as a community of gifts and ethical obligations rather than a society in which the material needs of all people are met”.[29]
20. “Bataillian cultural politics naturalizes the dominant class interests by substituting ‘symbolic value’ (honor, prodigality, sovereignty) for ‘use value’ (the needs of working people)”.[30]
21. “Consumption theory is a faith-based theory whose main and only lesson is a religious one: higher spirituality requires that people give up their needs (and resign themselves to a life of poverty) in order to obtain redemption, inner peace, and holiness”.[31]
22. “Bataille’s ‘aristocratic critique’ of capitalism is a rigorous reinforcing of that exploitative regime; a critique of utility and arguing for the ‘need to destroy and to lose’ constructs the prodigal subject necessary for the continued accumulation of capital”.[32]
23. “Sovereignty, generosity, and the ethics of the gift will all construct subjects who, as a matter of course, consume intensely and, in doing so, provide a reliable and steady pool of consumers to absorb overproduction”.[33]
24. “Consumption theory is not only a guideline for wasting, but also an epistemology for the new cultural discourses and a frame for contemporary cultural critique”.[34]
25. “The shift from production to consumption not only produces the prodigal subject of shopping but also the ecstatic pleasures of sensual critique — a critique that bypasses the political economy of labor (base) in order to experience the concrete of cultural performatives in themselves”.[35]

Now it is time to respond to each of these critiques.

1. Bataille does not argue that matter is within any category. In fact, Bataille’s base matter is acategorical. It is a matter which escapes idealism and therefore materialism as well. It is most definitely not a product of the mind.
2. This is not why Bataille thinks materialism is a form of idealism. Rather, he thinks materialism is a form of idealism because the matter of materialism is an ideal matter.
3. Bataille’s base materialism, as Benjamin Noys and others have said, isn’t definitionally or conceptually anything. For theorists like Noys, base materialism is a logic.
4. Again, this is going off a misconception of what base materialism is. It is hardly anything spiritual and has nothing to do with commodities.
5. Bataille doesn’t do anything to the material. He thinks matter is essentially the noumenon but without the conceptual Kantian limitations, as theorists such as Nick Land argue.
6. His theory of life as bi-axial is not a story. He is just showing how humans are in a discontinuous state, as well as a contradictory state. We are, in terms of our bodily composition, on the vertical axis (we stand up straight), but our consciousness (sight) is on the horizontal axis (our eyes are horizontal). Animals are on the horizontal axis and plants are on the vertical axis. Humans are on both. Thus, we are in a contradictory state, we are discontinuous. It isn’t a story. It is a theory of ontological composition.
7. In The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade, Bataille literally argues that revolution doesn’t always have to be utilitarian or idealist. He says, “[t]he revolutionary impulse of the proletarian masses … is sometimes implicitly and sometimes openly treated as sacred, and this is why it is possible to use the word Revolution entirely stripped of its utilitarian meaning, without, however, giving it an idealist meaning”.[36] Bataille definitely doesn’t hold that poverty is a virtue. In fact, in Eroticism, he says, “poverty releases men from the taboos that make human beings of them, not as transgression does, but in that a sort of hopelessness, not absolute perhaps, gives the animal impulses free rein. Hopelessness is not a return to animal nature”.[37]
8. Again, he does nothing to materialism other than release it from the ontological prison it has been put in by philosophy.
9. But Bataille does want to get rid of (wage-)labor as it isn’t sovereign. He is not performativity without concepts.
10. Again, Bataille is not in favor of wage-labor. When they speak about “sensual concrete rituals” as things which support capitalism, I can’t help but laugh. The ontological destruction of subjects in ecstasy cannot help capitalism, a system built on production, and the extraction of surplus value. The issue I find is that what Bataille is advocating for is a life without work. Bataille’s view of sovereignty as being above the productive negativity that is work, makes his philosophical system incompatible with capitalism.
11. It is because of obligation that Bataille couldn’t support this model of the potlatch as the model of the general economy. Bataille couldn’t support this model of the potlatch as the model of the general economy because Bataille was “against” teleological action as it made it impossible to purely expend, as one would always be gaining a “profit” (their desired end).
12. Bataille hated nothing more than the barrier that was the individual. He hated it, just like God hated himself. To say Bataille was an individualist may be one of the most laughable claims ever made about Bataille. Bataille, again, would not support the act of potlatch if one was doing it for the point of accumulating social capital. That would preclude potlatch from being pure expenditure.
13. Expenditure is not a means for shifting identity, rather it is the undoing of the subject and its identity. I don’t understand where they are getting this from. Sovereignty is definitely not any form of transcendence but rather immanence. Sovereignity is the acquisition of NOTHING. Sovereignty cannot accumulate. The subject cannot recognize anything about commodities in the state of sovereignty, because the subject would not exist as an isolated being that does teleological action.
14. The general economy doesn’t include commodities in the way the capitalist (restricted) economy does, if at all. All excess eludes meaning. The meaning of excess is the excess of meaning. The general economy looks at the general movement of energy across the Earth, not commodity production. One may be able to go as far to say that the general economy doesn’t include commodities because the general economy is the realm of the sacred, the realm beyond things, and commodities are things, things in the profane realm.[38] The general economy is thus the realm of intimacy as well. This latter fact is problematic for Ebert and Zavarzadeh because the thing which is a commodity finds nothing but its annihilation and non-expression in intimacy.[39]
15. Bataille isn’t saying that production is subordinated to expenditure, but rather that production’s truth is found within expenditure, or, in other words, expenditure is the truth of production. Bataille definitely would disagree with the idea that the expending subject finds meaning in expenditure because, again, expenditure is the undoing of the subject.
16. So if Bataille’s political theory is the absence of labor, the refusal of accumulation and production, and the suspension of teleological action, then is it not the antithesis to capitalism? If capitalism loses its coherence and transgresses its limits, then is it not everything but capitalism?
17. This point is predicated off the false presupposition that Bataille’s model of the general economy is analogous with the tribe in the potlatch doing the teleological end of the potlatch in order to accumulate social status.
18. Bataille does not see events such as sacrifice, loss, etc. as movements, moments, or events of history but rather as those moments which elude historicization. The master and slave who construct history are undone in those moments of sacrificial loss, and with their collective dissolution, history too dissolves.
19. Bataille doesn’t hold obligation or “gifts” (are gifts which you must give really gifts?) to be a part of his system. Again, teleology is not a part of his system.
20. This point, ONCE MORE, operates off the false presupposition that Bataille supports the model of the potlatch Ebert and Zavarzadeh describe. And because Bataille clearly holds that teleological action is servile, one can easily deduce that a contradiction arises when Ebert and Zavarzadeh speak of symbolic value as honor, prodigality, and sovereignty because sovereignty is the undoing of not only those other two terms, but also of the symbolic and the idea of value (as in valuing, or values).
21. Bataille would not support the high. If consumption theory teaches that one must go towards the high and one must go through poverty, then Bataille is the farthest thing from a consumption theorist.
22. Bataille’s critique of capitalism hardly constructs any subject through loss and expenditure. Rather, the expenditure of the subject that undoes the subject precludes the accumulation of capital necessary to capitalism.
23. Sovereignty is the undoing of the (isolated) subject not the construction of it!
24. As I have said before, Bataille is not a consumption theorist by Ebert and Zavarzadeh’s definition of it!
25. Sensual critique (general economic critique) actually accesses “the political economy of labor (base)” better than Marxist critique (restricted economic critique) can because the general economy is the truth of the restricted economy (the political economy of labor or ‘the base’).

References

[1]: Mas’Ud Zavarzadeh, “‘The Stupidity That Consumption Is Just as Productive as Production’: In the Shopping Mall of the Post-al Left,” College Literature 21, no. 3 (1994): pp. 92–114, 93.

[2–4]: Teresa L. Ebert and Masʼud Zavarzadeh, Class in Culture (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 181.

[5–11]: Ibid., 182.

[12]: Ibid., 182–183.

[13–16]: Ibid., 183.

[17–18]: Ibid., 184.

[19–20]: Ibid., 185.

[21]: Ibid., 186.

[22–23]: Ibid., 187.

[24–25]: Ibid., 188.

[26]: Ibid., 188–189.

[27]: Ibid., 189–190.

[28–29]: Ibid., 190.

[30–31]: Ibid., 191.

[32]: Ibid., 191–192.

[33–35]: Ibid., 192.

[36]: Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 100.

[37]: Georges Bataille, Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood (New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2012), 135.

[38]: Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991), 129.

[39]: Ibid., 132.

Bibliography

Bataille, Georges. Eroticism. Translated by Mary Dalwood. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2012.

— — — . The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991.

— — — . Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Translated by Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Ebert, Teresa L., and Masʼud Zavarzadeh. Class in Culture. New York, NY: Routledge, 2016.

Zavarzadeh, Mas’Ud. “‘The Stupidity That Consumption Is Just as Productive as Production’: In the Shopping Mall of the Post-al Left.” College Literature 21, no. 3 (1994): 92–114.