Georges Bataille – The Bourgeois World (Accursed Share, 1949)

[00:00:01]The bourgeoa world, the fundamental contradiction of the search for intimacy in works.

[00:00:12]At the origin of industrial society, based on the primacy and autonomy of commodities, of things, we find a contrary impulse to place what is essential, what causes one to tremble with fear and delight outside the world of activity, the world of things.

[00:00:30]But however this is shown, it does not controvert the fact that in general the capitalist society reduces what is human to the condition of a thing of a commodity.

[00:00:41]Religion and economy were delivered in one and the same movement from that which indebted them to one another. The former from profane calculation, the latter from limits given from the outside. But this fundamental opposition, this unexpected contradiction, is more interesting than it might seem at first. The problem that Calvinism so boldly solved is not limited to the interest that the historical study of religious matters always arouses. In fact, it is still the problem that dominates us. Religion in general answered the desire that man always had to find himself to regain an intimacy that was always strangely lost.

[00:01:21]But the mistake of all religion is to always give man a contradictory answer, an external form of intimacy. So the successive solutions only exacerbate the problem. Intimacy is never separated from external elements with that which it could not be signified. Where we think we have caught hold of the grail, we have only grasped a thing, and what is left in our hands is only a cooking pot.

[00:01:49]Man's current quest does not differ from those of Galahad or Kelvin, either in its object or in the disappointment that comes once the object is found. But the modern world goes about it in a different way. It does not look for anything illusory, and it means to achieve an essential conquest by directly solving the problems that are posed by things. Perhaps it is absolutely right. Often a complete separation seems necessary. If we are in search of an object of possession, then we can only propose to look for things since only things are within the province of activity and the search always commits us to activity. The Protestant critique of the Roman church, i.e. of the pursuit of activity expressed in works was not due to a strange scruple and its ultimate indirect consequence which commits mankind only to do without any further aim that which can be done in the order of things is indeed the only solution.

[00:02:51]But if man is to find himself in the end, he looks in vain when he follows the paths that have led him to self-estrangement.

[00:02:59]All he could expect by following them was to adapt for a service those things that are such however only to serve him.

[00:03:09]It is reasonable then to think that man cannot rediscover his truth without solving the problem of economy. But with respect to this necessary condition he can say and believe it is sufficient.

[00:03:22]He can affirm that he will be free once he has complied with the exigencies given in things that are necessary in the physical arrangements without which his needs cannot be satisfied.

[00:03:33]An obstacle will stop him. However, he will not be able to grasp that which he is bereft of any better than if he had taken paths more open to criticism. What he grasps will be no different from what was grasped by those who preceded him in his quest. as always he will only catch hold of things and will take the shadow which they are for the prey he was hunting.

[00:03:58]I maintain that the argument according to which the solution of the material problem is sufficient is the most admissible one at first. But even if the solution of the problems of life, the key to which is a man's not becoming merely a thing but of being in a sovereign manner, were the unavoidable consequence of a satisfactory response to material exodencies, it remains radically distinct from that response with which it is often confused. For this reason I can say concerning Calvinism having capitalism as a consequence that it poses a fundamental problem. How can man find himself or regain himself seeing that the action to which the search commits him in one way or another is precisely what estranges him from himself? The different statements in modern times of this disconcerting problem help to make us aware both of what is at issue now in history and of the projected fulfillment that is offered us.

[00:05:04]The resemblance between the reformation and Marxism.

[00:05:09]Considering the course followed by the reformers and its consequences, would it be paradoxical to conclude it put an end to the relative stability and equilibrium of a world in which man was less estranged from himself than we are at present?

[00:05:24]It would be easy, in fact, to find ourselves personally looking for a form of humanity that does not betray it, shunning those vacant lots, those suburbs and factories whose appearance expresses the nature of industrial societies, and making our way towards some dead city bristling with Gothic spires.

[00:05:45]We cannot deny that present day humanity has lost the secret kept until the current age of giving itself a face in which it might recognize the splendor that is proper to it.

[00:05:56]Doubtless the works of the Middle Ages in a sense were only things.

[00:06:02]They could rightly appear worthless to anyone who envisioned beyond in its inaccessible purity the wealth that he attributed to God. And yet the medieval representation of society has the power today of evoking that lost intimacy.

[00:06:20]A church is perhaps a thing. It is little different from a barn which clearly is a thing. A thing is what we know from without. What is given to us as a physical reality verging on a utility available without reserve. We cannot penetrate a thing and it has no meaning other than its material qualities adapted or not to some useful purpose in the productive sense of the word. But the church expresses an intimate feeling and addresses itself to intimate feeling. It is perhaps the thing that a building is. But the thing that a barn really is is adapted to the gathering in of the crops. It comes down to the physical qualities that were given to it. measuring the costs against the anticipated advantages in order to subordinate it to that use.

[00:07:08]The expression of intimacy in the church corresponds rather to the needless consumption of labor. From the start the purpose of the edifice withdraws it from public utility, and this first movement is accentuated in a profusion of useless ornaments.

[00:07:23]For the construction of a church is not a profitable use of the available labor, but rather its consumption, the destruction of its utility. Intimacy is not expressed by a thing, except on one condition, that this thing be essentially the opposite of a thing, the opposite of a product, of a commodity, a consumption, and a sacrifice.

[00:07:47]Since intimate feeling is a consumption, it is consumption that expresses it, not a thing, which is its negation.

[00:07:56]The capitalist bourgeoisi relegated the construction of churches to a subordinate plane, preferring to construct factories instead. But the church dominated the whole system of the middle ages. It erected its steeples wherever men were grouped together for common works. Thus, it was clear and visible from afar that the basist works had a higher purpose. apart from their tangible interest. This purpose was the glory of God. But is not God in a sense a distant expression of man in the anguish of the depths he perceives?

[00:08:29]That said, the longing for a bygone world is nonetheless based on a limited judgment. The regret that I might have for a time when the obscure intimacy of the animal was scarcely distinguished from the immense flux of the world indicates a power that is truly lost.

[00:08:45]But it fails to recognize what matters more to me. Even if he has lost the world in leaving animality behind, man has nonetheless become that consciousness of having lost it which we are and which is more in a sense than a possession of which the animal is not conscious.

[00:09:04]It is man in a word being that which alone matters to me and which the animal cannot be.

[00:09:11]Likewise, the romantic longing for the Middle Ages is in fact only an abandonment. It has the meaning of a protest against the rise of industry versus the non-productive use of resources. It correlates with the opposition to the values given in the cathedrals of capitalist interest to which modern society can be reduced.

[00:09:31]This longing refuses to see at the basis of the industrial rise the spirit of contestation and change the need to go from all parts to the limit of the world's possibilities.

[00:09:42]It can doubtless be said of the Protestant critique of saintly works that it gave the world over to profane work that the demand for divine purity only managed to exile the divine and to complete man's separation from it.

[00:09:56]It can be said finally that starting then things dominated man in so far as he lived for enterprise and less and less in the present time.

[00:10:06]But domination is never total.

[00:10:10]And in a deep sense it is only a comedy.

[00:10:13]It never deceives more than partly.

[00:10:16]While in the propitious darkness a new truth turns stormy.

[00:10:21]The Protestant positing of an unattainable divinity, irreducible to the actionbound mind no longer has any real meaning for us. One could even declare it absent from the world, having lost its connection to that uncompromising demand. The current Protestant way of thinking is more human, as if the positing were itself bound to resemble the divinity it defined.

[00:10:44]But this absence may be illusory, analogous to that of the traitor whom no one denounces and who is everywhere. In a limited sense, the reformation has ceased to exert any action. Yet it survives in the rigors of consciousness, in the lack of naive, in the maturity of the modern world. Given the lethargy of the multitude, Calvin's subtle demand for integrity, the sharpedged tension of reason, which is not satisfied with little and is never satisfied with itself, and an extremist and rebellious way of thinking, take on the appearance of a pathetic vigil.

[00:11:23]The multitude has surrendered to the somnolence of production, living the mechanical existence, half ludicrous, half revolting of things.

[00:11:33]But conscious thought reaches the last degree of alertness in the same movement. On the one hand, it pursues in an extension of technical activity the investigation that leads to an increasingly clear and distinct knowledge of things.

[00:11:47]In itself, science limits consciousness to objects. It does not lead to self-consciousness.

[00:11:53]It can know the subject only by taking it for an object, for a thing. But it contributes to the wakefulness by accustoming us to precision and by disappointing us, for it acknowledges its limits. It admits its powerlessness to arrive at self-consciousness.

[00:12:11]On the other hand, thought does not at all abandon in the face of industrial development man's basic desire to find himself to have a sovereign existence beyond a useful action that he cannot avoid.

[00:12:25]This desire has only become more insistent. Protestantism referred ban's encounter with his truth to the other world.

[00:12:32]Marxism, which inherited its rigor and gave a precise form to disorderly impulses, denies even more than Calvinism a tendency of man to look for himself directly when he acts. It resolutely excludes the foolishness of sentimental action.

[00:12:50]By reserving action for the changing of the material organization, Markx clearly formulated that which Calvin had merely outlined, a radical independence of things, of the economy in relation to other religious or generally effective concerns.

[00:13:07]Conversely, he implied the independence with respect to action of the return movement of man to himself, to the profoundity, the intimacy of his being.

[00:13:18]This movement can take place only after the liberation is achieved and only after the action is completed.

[00:13:26]This specific aspect of Marxism is usually overlooked. Marxism is charged with the confusion of which I speak above. For Markx, the solution of the material problem is sufficient. But for man, the fact of not being merely like a thing, but of being in a sovereign manner, in theory, given as its unavoidable consequence, nonetheless remains different from a satisfactory response to material demands.

[00:13:53]Mark's originality in this regard lies in his wanting to achieve a moral result, only negatively, by the elimination of material obstacles.

[00:14:03]This leads people to attribute an exclusive concern with material goods to him. They fail to notice in the provocative clarity his utter discretion and his aversion for religious forms whereby man's truth is subordinated to hidden ends.

[00:14:20]The fundamental proposition of Marxism is to free the world of things of the economy entirely from every element that is extraneous to things to the economy.

[00:14:32]It was by going to the limit of the possibilities implied in things, by complying with their demands without reservation, by replacing the government of particular interests with the government of things, by carrying to its ultimate consequences the movement that reduces man to the condition of a thing, that Marx was determined to reduce things to the condition of man, and man to the free disposition of himself.

[00:15:00]In this perspective of man liberated through action, having affected a perfect adequation of himself to things, man would have them behind him, as it were. They would no longer enslave him.

[00:15:12]A new chapter would begin where man would finally be free to return to his own intimate truth, to freely dispose of the being that he will be, that he is not now, because he is servant.

[00:15:26]But by the very fact of this position which as far as intimacy is concerned dissolves away offers nothing. Marxism is less the completion of the Calvinist project than a critique of capitalism which it reproaches with having liberated things without rigor without any other end without any other law than chance and private interest.

[00:15:53]The world of modern industry or the bourgeoa world.

[00:15:59]Capitalism in a sense is an unreserved surrender to things heedless of consequences and seeing nothing beyond them. For common capitalism, things products and production are not as for the Puritans what is becoming and wants to become. If things are within it, if it is itself the thing, this is in the way that Satan inhabits the soul of someone possessed unbeknown to him or that the possessed without knowing it is Satan himself.

[00:16:33]Self-denial, which in Calvinism was the affirmation of God, was an unattainable ideal in a sense. It could be the act of strong personalities capable of imposing the values with which they identified.

[00:16:46]But exceptions always came into play. On the other hand, freedom given to things was the common possibility. There was no need to maintain the purest and poorest spirituality which alone was rigorous enough in the beginning to counterbalance the subjection of the whole body and of activity to things.

[00:17:07]But once the principle of servitude was granted, the world of things, the world of modern industry, could develop of itself without any further thought of the absent God, the advantage was clear in minds always quick to grasp the real object of allowing intimacy to recede beyond the threshold of consciousness.

[00:17:26]The reign of things was supported, moreover, by the natural propensity to servitude. It corresponded in the same movement to that pure will to power to growth for its own sake that outwardly contrary to the serval spirit is basically only its compliment in the service of a power that is not used the perfect form of the absorption of resources and growth is found the only genuine nullification the least slippery renunciation of life. But this attitude is often difficult to distinguish from that of the pure Calvinist, although it is the latter's opposite.

[00:18:06]At least the Calvinist was at the highest point of alertness and tension.

[00:18:10]The man of industrial growth, having no other purpose than growth, on the contrary, is the expression of Snodons.

[00:18:18]No tension around him, no desire to adapt a world to his standards.

[00:18:24]The men whose action resulted in modern industry were not even aware, the idea not having occurred to them, that such a world might be possible. They were utterly unconcerned about an impetence in the movement that carried them along, but could not reduce the world to its law. They even used for the development of enterprise the openings that were maintained by the continued existence of various movements contrary to theirs. In the capitalist world, there was no principal preference given to the production of the means of production.

[00:18:56]This preference was to appear only in communist accumulation.

[00:19:00]The bourgeoisi was unaware of any opposition between the primacy of growth and its contraries. Unproductive expenditures of all sorts, institutions and values that create expenditures. The opposition only concerned and only affected the amount of the expenditure.

[00:19:17]Bourgeoa capitalism was opposed to luxury but only in a feeble and illogical way. Its avarice and its action did actually reduce luxury. But if one excludes the uncalculated effects, it never departs from lazair.

[00:19:33]Thus the bourgeoisi created the world of confusion. It was essentially a world of things. But as man's reduction was no longer linked to his nullification before God, all that did not enter into the sleep of growth suffered from the abandonment of the search for a beyond.

[00:19:54]However, no paths were closed precisely because things generally prevailed and dominated the movement of the multitude.

[00:20:02]All the aborted dreams remained available. life, the global movement of life, became detached from them, no doubt, but they still serve as consolation for troubled beings. A chaos began, where, in the most contrary ways, everything became equally possible.

[00:20:20]Society's unity was maintained, owing to the unquestioned importance and success of the dominant activity. In this uncertainty, the temptations of the past easily survived their invalidation. The contradictions to which they had led ceased to be felt in a world where reality was all the more hateful for being publicly the measure of man. The romantic protest itself was free. But that freedom in every sense meant that man regarded in his unity in the undifferentiated aggregate consented to be only a thing.

[00:20:58]the resolution of material difficulties and the radicalism of marks to the extent that mankind is in complicity with the bourgeoisi on the whole that is it vaguely consents to be nothing more as mankind than things. Yet it is within this confused multitude and tied to confusion as a plant is tied to the ground that the spirit of rigor proliferates. Its essence is in wanting through a completion of things, an adequation of things, of production and man, the access or return of man to himself. And to the extent that this rigger has the goal of developing the pure sciences and the techniques, the bourgeois world leaves it an open field.

[00:21:48]Within the limits of strictly economic activity, the rigor has a precise object, the dedication of excess resources to the removal of life's difficulties, and to the reduction of labor time. This is the only use of wealth that coincides with an adequation of man to things, and it retains the negative character of action, whose goal for man remains the possibility of being entirely at his own disposal. The spirit of rigor tied to the development of the sciences and techniques is well equipped for this fundamental operation. But the use of the comfort and the myriad services of industrial civilization cannot be limited to a small number of privileged persons. Sumptuary use had functions. It manifested values and it implied the connection between wealth and the responsibility of manifesting those values. But this manifestation resulted from the error that makes us want to grasp like things that which is predicated on the negation of things.

[00:22:48]The spirit of rigor is thus committed to destroying the remnants of the ancient world. The capitalist law leaves it free to develop the material possibilities that it bears within it, but at the same time tolerates privileges that hinder this development. Under these conditions, the rigor quickly leads one to draw from the sciences and techniques the consequences that reduce the chaos of the present world to the rigor of things themselves, which is the rational linking together of all the operations on things. It then has a revolutionary significance that Markx formulated in a sovereign way.

[00:23:30]the remnants of feudalism and religion.

[00:23:33]The necessity of first eliminating the values of the past must be made clear, however, in the economic system of the Middle Ages, wealth was unevenly distributed between those who manifested the accepted values in the name of which wealth was wasted and those who furnished the wasted labor. The work of the fields or the towns thus had a survile quality with respect to the values manifested, but so did the worker with respect to the clerics and nobles.

[00:24:00]These latter claimed not to be things, but the quality of thinghood, verbal protests notwithstanding, fell squarely on the worker. The original situation has a specific consequence. One cannot expect to liberate man by going to the limit of the possibilities of things and nonetheless leave free as capitalism does those who have no other reason for being than the negation of work which is base in favor of more elevated activities asserted to be the only ones capable of restoring man to himself. In a sense, the remnants of feudalism and religion, which capitalism overlooks, represent the immutable and unconscious desire to make a thing of the worker.

[00:24:44]Comparatively, the worker can only be a thing if we liberate ourselves by devoting ourselves to an activity that repudiates the labor of the worker. The fulfillment of things, the complete adequation of man to production can have a liberating effect only if the old values tied to non-productive expenditures are denounced and dismantled as the Roman values were during the Reformation. Indeed, there is no doubt that man's return to himself implies, first of all, that the deceitful faces of the aristocracy and of religion be unmasked, for they are not really the face of man, but his appearance lent to things. Man's return to himself cannot be confused with the error of those who claim to grasp intimacy as one grasps a loaf of bread or a hammer.

[00:25:37]Communism and man's adequation to the utility of things.

[00:25:42]A radical position to which the workingclass world has given its political consequences emerges from the above. In a sense, it is a strange position. It is first of all a radical affirmation of real material forces and a no less radical negation of spiritual values. The communists always give precedence to things as against that which dares not have their subordinate character.

[00:26:07]This attitude is based solidly on the tastes of the proletarians who commonly lack a sense of spiritual values who of their own accord reduce man's interest to interest pure and simple and who see the human universe as a system of things subordinated to one another. The plow plows the field. The field produces wheat. The wheat feeds the blacksmith who forges the plow. This in no way excludes the higher aspirations, but these are changeable, vague, open, by contrast with those of the old type of populations, which are usually traditional and immutable. Indeed, the proletarians undertake man's liberation starting from things to which they were reduced by a world whose values were almost inaccessible to them. They do not involve him in ambitious projects. They do not construct a rich and variegated world modeled on the ancient mythologies or the medieval theologies. Their attention is apt to be limited to what is there. But they are not closely bound by the elevated phrases that express their feelings. In their universe there is no firm limit to posed to the general linking of things subordinating one another. Irrigorously practical politics, a brutal politics reducing its reasons to strict reality, is still what best corresponds to their passion, a politics that reveals the intentions of a selfish group, and is all the more ruthless. A militant of this persuasion is easily reduced to a strict subordination. He readily accepts being finally reduced by the work of liberation to the condition of a thing which is the case for example when discipline prescribes to contradictory slogans in succession. This radical attitude has a strange consequence. It gives to the bourgeoa to the exploitation which the workers want to abolish the feeling of upholding freedom for mankind of avoiding the reduction of individuals to things. And yet what is involved is only an enormous effort whose aim is self-determination.

[00:28:07]In actual fact, the bourgeoa cannot really forget that the freedom of their world is the freedom of confusion. In the end, they are merely helpless. The immense results of workingclass politics, the generalized provisional servitude that is its only sure consequence frightens them. But they can only bemoan the situation. They no longer have a sense of their historical mission. The fact is that as a response to the ascendant movement of the communists, they cannot give rise to the least hope.