Introduction: Destruction and Immortality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2022
Summary
Abstract
This introduction provides an overview of the book's approach to the creation, reproduction and destruction in and of theory, culture and media. Beginning with the prehistorical establishment of sedentary communities and tracing some relevant cultural undercurrents, it provides a meta-analytical genealogy of the concept of expenditure after Georges Bataille. The destruction of energy in excess of need is shown to be an underlying principle that ensures the paradoxical tension between the desire for immortality and destruction as it is expressed in human culture. The chapter also provides the contextual and theoretical basis for the book, as the intoxication of destruction, and describes the destructive tension-relation at the heart of each subsequent chapter.
Keywords: Georges Bataille, Destruction Culture, Prehistoric Art, Economy of Expenditure, Immortality, Media Destruction
We can ignore or forget the fact that the ground we live on is little other than a field of multiple destructions.
In The Accursed Share, Georges Bataille details what he understands to be a universal theory in the general economy of energy, the driving operation of which is expenditure and waste. Most reflections on this ‘general economy’ since Bataille have primarily focussed on locating and describing the experience or object of that expenditure. However, it is unlocatable in relation to either the individual or the universal, because, as Bataille argues, sites of expenditure are temporally, materially and culturally specific, unable to be repeated without differentiation, and unable to be expressed fully after the fact. The object, experience or moment of expenditure, therefore, cannot be identified, as it is unique to each iteration of its occurrence. However, what can be described and mapped is the constitution and orientation of the operation through which nonproductive expenditure may be provoked.
The making and reproduction of culture requires novelty, creativity, and a sense of biological mortality by communicating an idea into an imagined future. Necessarily, cultural objects and forms also imply destruction, and the fragile energetic limitations of both humanity and objects created by it. The desire for an experience free from the utility of survival, through what Bataille terms the ‘nonproductive expenditure of energy’, appears in the impulse to represent a thought, idea or experience to other bodies and to make it manifest in the world, separate from one's own agency, in other words, the impulse to immortality, exists in the birth of art.
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- The Intoxication of Destruction in Theory, Culture and MediaA Philosophy of Expenditure after Georges Bataille, pp. 11 - 26Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022