Modes of Luxurious Walking

 
If there is a single, obsessive object of thought in Georges Bataille – from Guilty (1944/1988) and Blue of Noon (1957/1978) to his magnum opus The Accursed Share (1949/1988) – it is the expenditure of wealth and energy. The very object of study, despite the rigid and calculated necessity of knowledge, transcends everything productive. Expenditure is at the core of human acquisition (in terms of knowledge, economy, and moral restraint), which implies that there is an irresistible violent force at work in all of our attempts to furnish subjectivity with some measure of concrete stability. This is precisely why Allan Stoekl writes in his introduction to Bataille’s Peak that the meaning and survival of the community is nothing else than an aftereffect of what is sacred, i.e., “the drive to spend without counting, without attempting to anticipate return” (xvii). The ethical, in a similar vein, cannot be separated from an incessant flash of energy that is itself only ever partially reducible to human needs and projects. In just this way, it is a radically heterogeneous form of religious experience which, for Bataille, provides us with an unknowable basis for thinking through our social and ethical relationships. This kind of experience is provocatively self-contradictory: it returns us, through ritualistic forms of sacrifice, to a kind of intimacy with the world which destroys its own conditions of knowledge.
 
Keeping to this paradox of atheistic mysticism, Stoekl ably crafts a unique position in current environmental debates. These debates almost always privilege human subjectivity.1 A Bataillean model of energy and religion, by contrast, affirms no such humanistic principle. Stoekl’s position, then, is one which will emphasize expenditure both within and against the closed economies of utility and personal satisfaction (191). This in turn will expose a blind spot in contemporary theories of Empire which posit the “end of nature,” as such an end requires the very energy which it repudiates. Doubtless, this is a provocative undertaking; and Stoekl, who is highly regarded for his 1985 publication of Visions of Excess, brings it into focus with passionate writing and methodical expertise.
 
Privileging excess and expenditure rather than conservation and self-interest, Bataille reverses the usual order of economic thinking. Such a reversal, as Stoekl reminds us, can be traced back – in certain respects – to Bruno and Sade. In the first, matter is equated with a kind of energy which is concomitantly active and passive. The formless, infinite nature of God, according to Bruno, cannot be separated from that which passively receives its concrete shape and reality. In this heterodoxical Christian position (for which Bruno was burned at the stake), matter is movement and movement is corruption and corruption, in turn, is regeneration. Physical barriers are thus broken down by the very action of nature through which God is immanently identified with both creativity and destruction. In a similar way, albeit from a violently atheistic perspective, Sade affirms an underlying principle of nature associated with sheer transformation. Contributing to this process is the manifestation of movement and the stimulation of senses via sovereign crime. The Sadean hero is indifferent to morality, and overthrows it by way of an extreme form of selfishness. Bataille, however, retains the paradox of a limit to be perpetually crossed: the death of God must be lived, otherwise we have returned to an apathetic transgression which destroys itself in its own egotistical assertion. For this reason, Stoekl rightly observes that Sade needs the human, and needs God, without which there is no criminal defiance (16). Bataille’s theory of expenditure begins with such a paradoxical formulation: moral awareness mustn’t be eradicated or toppled, but affirmed through its very destruction. The excess of God and human morality is to be discovered in a revision of Sadean crime which opens up the self to an immeasurable experience: “[A]n extreme devotion to crime—to, as the prewar Bataille would put it, the production of heterogeneous objects—leads, surprisingly, to a self-sacrificing generosity. The self is not simply destroyed in a whirlwind of energy; the self is destroyed through an excess of energy entailing a mortal gift of oneself in love, in crime, to the other” (28).
 
Any discussion of Bataillean waste, excess, and profligacy invites the question as to whether this general economy should be distinguished from modern capitalist societies in which blind, ruinous extravagance seems to be the predominant moral imperative. If anything, modern industrial economies are built on extraordinary waste and extreme ecological devastation; thus one could plausibly argue, as Jean-Joseph Goux has, that the risk-taking ethos of transnational capitalism is the quintessential post-bourgeois embodiment of Bataillean expenditure (Stoekl 137). There is, of course, an all too obvious blind spot to this eternal perpetuation of cultural and economic excess: it cannot be sustained. As demand for energy dramatically increases over the next few decades, we will surely witness, as predicted by the petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert (in what is called, alluding to a bell-curve graph, “Hubbert’s Peak”), a vast and imminent depletion of our fossil fuel resources. Stoekl draws the discomfiting but probable conclusion that “the more or less constant growth in productivity, production, and profits the world experienced over the last century, tracked with a commensurate population increase, based as both were on increases in energy production, is nearing its end” (119). If we will soon reach a point where we can no longer rely upon large quantities of highly concentrated sources of energy, without which the very essence of modern consumerist subjectivity will be thrown into disarray, then a call to personal sacrifice must not be far behind. Thus, Lisa H. Newton, in direct response to the problem of scarcity, argues for a simpler and more authentic life in contrast to the currently unsustainable levels of status-driven consumption (Stoekl 120). Sustaining our globalized economy at a more appropriate, more rational level will necessarily require a fundamental change in our approach to natural resources. This implies the conservation of energy, to be sure, but Newton also links this approach to a moral and religiously inspired perspective, one which renounces easy pleasure and artificial consumerism. The new self – simple, austere, rational – seems to be absolutely crucial to the survival of the planet. In this context, Bataille’s theory of excess life and wild expenditure would appear to be deeply problematic.
 
Without falling back on eco-religion, evangelical environmentalism, or various strands of consumerist humanism, Stoekl makes the radically innovative argument that Bataille’s theory of expenditure, when properly modified and updated, helps us to carve out a post-sustainable ecological perspective. The critics Stoekl draws on, by contrast, all rely upon some version (hidden or otherwise) of anthropocentric ethics. They are based upon human instrumentality, and thus they cannot be severed from a project-oriented subject. If we think back to Newton, we are reminded of the need to cultivate an “authentic self,” one sustained by its rational interdependence with nature. It follows that the simple, honest self is the self that survives. Likewise, Gary Gardner invokes religion as a means of fostering ecological awareness through ritual, tradition, and community bonding (Stoekl 153) — not an inherently bad message. Nevertheless, Stoekl questions whether this is simply a religious pretense: “If we reconfigure religion only to ‘foster and sustain’, then to what extent can we continue even to believe in the independent power and validity of religion? Doesn’t it simply become one more tool, suited to the accomplishment of a task?” (155). Even the irrationally self-destructive individualism of David Brooks falls into this camp: the future of the happy, anti-conventional American subject is predicated upon an elusive but ideal wholeness which is the highest aim and accomplishment. In Bataille, the highest point justifies nothing. The summit – or peak – is always already equated with a sacrificial leap. Stoekl refers to this as the “good duality” in Bataille: there is a presupposition of limits, language and self-consciousness, as well as the infinite movement of loss and death which can never be contained by those evanescent boundaries. In consequence, there arises a sovereign form of life, self-consciousness, and history: “A self-consciousness . . . that grasps ‘humanity’ not as a stable or even dynamic presence, but as a principle of loss and destruction. A history not of peak moments of empire, democracy, or class struggle, but as exemplary instances of expenditure” (53).
 
Stoekl’s appropriation of Bataille, in light of the above quote, will strike many readers as counter-productive—to put it very politely. The only feasible solution to an ever-growing energy crisis, it will be said again, includes an ethics of self-restraint and a politics of ecological sustainability. Stoekl, however, reminds us that if Hubbert’s model is indeed correct, as it appears to be, then the very idea of sustainability is itself unsustainable. A permanently sustainable economy defies the same material and historical conditions that would otherwise make it seem so urgently necessary. Furthermore, to the extent that we are moved by irrational, excessive desires, it may be nearly impossible to convince the masses to follow a simple, austere, and authentic life (122). A more reasonable adaptation, Stoekl argues, taps into the same expenditure which most of us already pursue in a minor, attenuated form. Consumer spending, in fact, may itself be a response to this desire which is more primordial than our moral constructs. But now it would seem that we have come full circle: how is this desire for excess experiences to be distinguished from the same economic activity which apparently brought us to our present catastrophic situation?
 
The multi-layered, complex, book-length answer elaborated in Bataille’s Peak cannot be given here. The shorter answer, however, can be stated in two parts. First, Bataillean expenditure should be modified by taking into consideration qualitative differences between docile and insubordinate forms of energy. The fact that the former is a finite, quickly disappearing resource implies that we can no longer afford to ignore, as Bataille could, the issues of energy depletion and cultural decline (Stoekl 42). Drawing from two Heidegger essays, “The Question concerning Technology” and “The Age of the World Picture” (1977), Stoekl contextualizes weak, mechanized forms of expenditure by reference to fossil fuel consumption. Because we assume the world exists for us in a quantifiable way – to be conquered, stockpiled, and used up – we ourselves become a disposable thing or object: “Man the subject for whom the objective world exists as a resource is quickly reversed and becomes man the object who, under the right conditions, is examined, marshaled, and then releases a specific amount of energy before he himself is definitively depleted” (131). Docile energy, Stoekl surmises, makes for docile subjects. Only after we have acknowledged this contemporary fact are we able to complement the first part with a second: insubordinate forms of energy are essential to insubordinate forms of action. In the general movement of social ecstasy and expenditure, by way of which we transgress ourselves in moments of physical intimacy, we open the isolated self to an immensity which can be neither measured nor stockpiled. Nor can it be experienced through the timeless efficiency of the car: “As the ultimate common denominator, the car brings together, in the isolation of vapid subjectivity, social classes and identities. All are one on the freeway, mixing while not mixing, moving around the empty circuit of gutted urban space” (184). The simulacrum of freedom is achieved through speed, empty signifiers, and the indifferent reproduction of subjectivity. Excess is thus transformed into pure stream of consciousness, and our “cursed flesh” disappears as an abstract, useless obstacle to absolute technological freedom. By contrast, the inefficient movement, the clumsy and death-bound use of time, holds out the best promise for a post-sustainable future: walking, dancing, cycling, and spending oneself in a wounded but effervescent fusion of the self with the other (190). Passion and ecstatic movement in the post-fossil fuel era will therefore “be one of local incidents, ruptures, physical feints, evasions and expulsions (of matter, of energy, of enthusiasm of desire)” (190). As opposed to a closed economy of the useful, practical self, in which every moment of loss is immediately sublimated as a higher purpose and function, Bataille’s affirmation of an intimate relationship with the world and others necessarily subordinates the higher truth – and every mode of instant communication – to a formless substratum or base matter that will forever escape human domination.
 
This twofold response helps Stoekl to resituate contemporary arguments on both Empire and the totalized city. Drawing from Michel de Certeau’s “Walking in the City” (1980), Stoekl traces the historical loss of the body through the creation of a universal, albeit anonymous, modern subjectivity. The automobile, as already put forth, reframes reality so that everything is construed according to an “always but never changing image on the (wind)screen” (184). The car thus becomes a grand historical symbol of speed, freedom, transcendence, and the conquest of nature. But at the same time, none of this is possible without fuel. The same subject that manifests itself as pure movement and pure sovereignty is also a function of certain finite resources. Insofar as de Certeau fails to consider the role of cheap fossil fuel inputs in connection with the utopian and totalized city, he is unable to rethink the expenditure of energy as a mode of resistance to modern networks of conformity and surveillance. Stoekl, however, sees in de Certeau’s walker an intimation of another kind of energy subversion. What is crucial at this historical juncture isn’t only the unusual and peculiar connotations of the walker in contrast with the commodified autonomy of the driver, but furthermore the “spectacular waste of body energy” (188). This movement of intimate corporeal existence, wasting itself on a “grossly inefficient” effort (192), gestures toward something beyond the virtual reality of today’s Empire. As the universal city is no longer restricted by space or time, even the speeding car is being outpaced and outdistanced by the ubiquitous circulation of signs, images, and capital. And as the global scale shrinks to the size of instantaneous communication, the old dualities of private and public, society and nature, real and artificial, are quickly vanishing. Yet this very dialectic, which seemingly overcomes itself in a new, bland form of media domination, cannot possibly exist without a specific relationship to labor. Stoekl observes that in this respect Hardt and Negri, who would reduce all natural phenomena to moments of history (196), remain firmly tethered to Marx and Kojève—at least inasmuch as the historical returns us to a concrete function of labor. But even human labor has its limits. It is no more autonomous than the myth of Man which it intermittently supports, for it produces nothing in the absence of fuel (x). And fossil fuels are a natural fact: “Labor power discovered these fuels, put them to work, ‘harnessed’ them, transformed their energy into something useful. But labor power did not put the fuels into the earth” (197). There are, consequently, limits to Empire. And one of the most crucial limits, for us, is the imminent depletion of highly concentrated forms of energy. If the global spectacle is slowing down and a sustainable response is hardly sustainable (as Stoekl previously argued), it seems that we will have to rethink excess expenditure. Bataille’s Peak performs this task on every page, and does so in the most formidable, difficult terms—by reminding us of the general finitude, exertion, madness, and jouissance of bodily economies.