Bataille, Representation,
and the Media
By
Andrew Clapper,
The
influence of media and communication technology on Western society is, and has
most likely always been, inevitable. Since the Post-War rise and spread of
American ‘culture’, the role of media (most prominently the film and television
image) has greatly increased, becoming the subject of a far-reaching discourse.
However, the representational image
is nothing new to the human mind, and I believe a brief look at its influence
and interpretation throughout history will better inform our assessment of the
situation now.
Well over 100 centuries ago, during the Upper Paleolithic
Age, throughout northern Spain and southwestern France, and for reasons lost to
us in time, early Homo sapiens began
painting and carving images of reindeer and buffalo on the walls and ceilings
of nearby caves. By these first acts of representation, early humans did
something extraordinary; they further separated themselves from other animal
species and at the same time created some of humankind’s first representational
images. In his book about the cave paintings of
Bataille regards the birth of art as the birth of modern
humans. For him the paintings on the walls at
Nevertheless,
we must ask, what is the unique nature of this human world? Bataille’s answer to this question is found in his Theory of Religion, a short book in
which he attempts to link religious and economic activity through his notions
of waste, sacrifice, and expenditure. In the first section of the book, he
outlines his theory of the transition from animal to human. He defines
animality as immediacy or immanence. To explain what he means, he
uses as a starting point the scenario of one animal eating another. What makes
this situation interesting for Bataille, is that “there is no transcendence
between the eater and the eaten; there is a difference, of course, but this
animal that eats the other cannot confront it in an affirmation of that
difference.”5 For
animals then, there is no distinction between subject and object.6
For the animal that is the eater (subject), the animal eaten (object)
is not given as an object (thing) because the distinction is never made.
In this sense, all animals are immanent with respect to the world, because they
cannot recognize, in a significant way, anything as being other, or exterior to them. As Bataille puts it, “every animal is in the world like water in water.”7
It
is with the development of the tool that man begins to tear himself loose from
the animal world. Bataille writes, “The positing of the object, which is not
given in animality, is in the human use of tools … Insofar as tools are
developed with their end in view, consciousness posits them as objects, as
interruptions in the indistinct continuity.”8
It is by tools that an exteriority (world
of things) is identified within the blur of experience, and with the notion
of an end (function) that the idea of
duration, and therefore time, is imagined. The tool becomes a differentiated
object that bursts forth from experience, proclaiming itself as a unique entity
separated from all around it.
With
eyes now attuned to recognizing these objects,
early humans encountered another crisis, the
position of subjects in a world of objects. Bataille writes,
Thus, having determined stable and simple things which it
is possible to make, men situated on the same plane where the things appeared
(as if they were comparable to the digging stick, or chipped stone) elements
that were and nonetheless remained continuous with the world, such as animals,
plants, other men, and finally, the subject determining itself.9
In
effect, we see an internal emergence of the antithesis to the animal’s
immanence. Bataille continues, “This means in other words that we do not know
ourselves distinctly and clearly until the day we see ourselves from the
outside as another.”10
Thus man learns to think of himself from the outside, as something like the image of another, and at the same time
we attribute to these others the interiority of ourselves, and at times, more
strangely still, we project a subject into things, such as tools. Bataille
writes, “In the end, we perceive each appearance—subject (ourselves), animal,
mind, world—from within and from without at the same time, both as continuity,
with respect to ourselves, and as object.”11
In his essay “Hegel, la mort et le
sacrifice”, Bataille writes,
For Hegel, it is both fundamental
and altogether worthy of amazement that human understanding (i.e. language,
discourse) should have had the strength (an incomparable power) to separate its
constitutive elements from the Totality… Their separation implies human
Negativity in relation to Nature…12
The
creation of the world of objects, i.e. the carving up of Nature, the Totality,
into “things”, is seen as a negating action on the part of man. It is a breach
of Nature, a self-imposed separation
from the natural Unity, and, in the
lonely vessel of the ego, it is a separation from others. Bataille continues,
“This is the situation of Mankind’s separated being, it is his isolation in
Nature, and consequently, his isolation in the midst of his own kind, which
condemn him to disappear definitively.”13
In response to this fear of separation
(of disappearing) humans began to bridge the abyss, finding ways to reach out
to others and connect with them. They developed sounds and signs, which
symbolized the objects, tools, animals, and other humans they experienced, and
with which they could let others understand their thoughts and vice versa. They
also experienced this lost Unity in sex, where they could come together with
another and at the same time lose their identity, if only briefly.
Nevertheless, it was the systems of symbolization,
composed of sounds and signs (both forms of representation) which became the
more common form of communication. Bataille writes in his book Inner Experience, “With respect to men,
their existence is language. Each person imagines, and therefore knows of his
existence with the help of words.”14
Of the many experiences we have in life, it is only those that can be
communicated, however poorly, that can be considered part of the human world (here I mean something like
a community of humans).
We
can now see in detail the definitive departure of humankind from animality. In
a way men used tools to objectify the world, and hence to slice from the
continuous, undifferentiated, immediate, immanent world of the animal, a world
for themselves.15 This
world of objects was then structured
with symbolization (language). We can
now look at the walls of
A mere 23 centuries ago, on the walls of a different cave
(this one imaginary) we find in the
writings of Plato, not the foundations of the human world, but what is in a sense its completion. In book VII of The Republic, Socrates explains to
Glaucon the now famous allegory of the cave.
Behold!
Human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open toward the
light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood,
and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only
see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above
and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the
prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall
built along the way, like the screen which marionette-players have in front of
them, over which they show puppets… And … you see… men passing along the wall
carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood
and stone and various materials which appear over the wall… and they [the
prisoners] see only their own shadows, or shadows of one another, which the
fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave...16
Under
such circumstances, Socrates concludes, “To them the truth would be literally
nothing but the shadow of the images.”17
A truth in which, he believes, they are quite deluded.
In Book X of The Republic, Socrates, again speaking to Glaucon, explains what
has since been known as the fundamental doctrine of Platonism, which is The Theory of Ideas or The Theory of Forms. In this theoretical
model, in which Socrates inquires into the nature of imitation, he begins by
defining the idea (or form) of Ideas (or Forms). Socrates explains, “Whenever a
number of individuals have a common name, we assume them to have also a
corresponding idea or form…”18
For his example, Socrates chooses the common name bed. He then divides this name into three different examples of a bed. He explains, “here are three beds:
one existing in nature, which is made by God… There is another which is the
work of the carpenter… and the work of the painter is a third…”19
He
then explains each of these examples:
1.
God, whether from choice or from
necessity, made one bed in nature and one only; two or more such ideal beds
neither ever have been nor ever will be made by God.20
2.
[God] desired to be the real maker
of a real bed, not a particular maker [the carpenter] of a particular bed, and
therefore he created a bed which is essentially and by nature one only.21
3.
I think … that we may fairly
designate him [the painter] as the imitator of that which the others make …
[And] like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from
truth…22
He then asks, “Which is the art of
painting designed to be—an imitation of things as they are, or as they
appear—of appearances or of reality?”23
Socrates and Glaucon conclude beyond doubt that painters imitate appearances
and not realities.
How is it then that the philosophy of
Plato can be considered the completion of the project started in the caves of
What Plato fails to see is that the
Forms are realities of the human world
only, and therefore creations of the representations of language (sounds and
signs). There could be no Justice, Chair, or Virtue in the immanent world of
the animal; it is only when one learns to recognize tools and objects, and when
one separates oneself from the whole and then bridges this separation with
language that one can imagine the Forms.
In reality, what the Forms signify is
the completion of the human world. The
structure begun by Lascaux Man when
he represented reindeer and cattle on the walls and ceilings of caves has by
Plato’s time been perfected. In fact, it is so complete that Plato can, without
blushing, posit absolute Truth and Reality into this structure, that is in
language, the World of Being, which
is completely outside experience. The human
world, at this point, becomes completely estranged from the immanent world
of the animal, and as the history of philosophy can attest had reached its
apex.24
What Plato did not see was that the human world was the cave. Just as Lascaux Man retreated into the cave to
create his representations, so do all men communicate through representations,
and therefore exist in the cave. To repeat Bataille, “With respect to men,
their existence is language. Each person imagines, and therefore knows of his
existence with the help of words”; which are representations of things, which
man has separated from the world, and now, only recognizes with words. The
structure seems hermetic in its circularity.
There is, however, one critical
weakness in the structure of the human
world, and this was partially recognized by Plato. He writes in Book X of The Republic, “And the painter, too, is
… just such another—a creator of appearances.”25
Because the human world is a world of
representation, those who can create appearances, have the power to
fundamentally change the human world.
Therefore, just as the representational
image is in many ways the very foundation of the human world, it is also the greatest threat to its stability. In
the past century, this threat has become a reality in the dominant
representational arena of our time, the video arena.
A striking example of this danger is
found in Jean Baudrillard’s notion of third-order simulation, as described in
The example given for second-order
simulation is of a map which is made to such exactitude that it actually covers
the territory it is supposed to represent, thereby making it difficult to
discern the map from reality. As for a third-order simulation, Lane writes,
With first- and second-order simulation, the real still
exists, and we measure the success of simulation against the real. Baudrillard’s
worry with third-order simulation is that the model now generates what he calls
“hyperreality” – that is, a world without a real origin. So, with third order
simulation we no longer even have the real as part of the equation. Eventually,
Baudrillard thinks that hyperreality will be the dominant way of experiencing
and understanding the world (86-87).27
It is in the video image that we find
the hyperreality of the postmodern era. Beginning in the 19th
century and developing exponentially throughout the 20th century,
the increasingly dominant filmic or video image has already moved beyond
second-order simulation, where it appeared merely as a close proximity to
reality, to become reality itself. As I see it, the human world, which is the world of representational structures,
which began in the cave at Lascaux and became autonomous by Plato’s time, has
since then increasingly distanced itself from the immanent Unity (Nature), which was its origin (and
original referent).
Originally the human
world was structured by first order-simulation (objects and tools), which
in many ways still referred to the continuity of the animal world, while always
keeping a measured distance and isolation from it. When the separation become
complete, that is with Plato, the referent of the structures of the human world became something outside of
experience (the World of Being), something only present in the very
representational structure (for example Truth,
or Justice). The self-referencing and
circular characteristics of the human world
were initially concealed by the illusion of a World of Being, that is an eternal, universal Truth. However, when this fantasy gave way (in the death of God) to phantasmagoria and the realization that
representation is reality, the
possibility of third-order simulation became very real, and the ubiquitous
television image has become the means to hyperreality.
In my view, hyperreality is the
postmodern form of immanence. What we see in hyperreality is a return of Unity
and immediacy, but in this instance completely within the structures of the human world. The symptoms of this
hyperreal immanence are already found within the postmodern discourse. In his
essay Postmodernism and Consumer Society,
Fredric Jameson explains two key concepts of postmodernism, schizophrenia and the death of the subject. In the death of the subject, we find, “the end
of individualism as such,”28
and in schizophrenia, “the
schizophrenic thus does not know personal identity in our sense, since our
feeling of identity depends on our sense of the persistence of the ‘I’ and the
‘me’ over time.”29
Thus
it seems the subject (ego, identity) is only sustainable when we precariously
attempt to span both the animal immanent world and the human world. Before the creation of the human world, there was only the immanence of the animal world, and
now in the autonomous human world we
again seem to be dissolving into immanence.Ç
©Andrew Clapper, 2006
Notes
1 Georges Bataille, Prehistoric Painting:
2 Homo faber a predecessor to Homo
sapiens is credited with the invention of tools, but as Bataille writes:
“Not before the advent of Aurignacian man—Neanthropus,
who lived at Lascaux—do we encounter evidence, and then indeed abundant
evidence, of the aptitude to create works of art. This aptitude, it is worth
remarking, coincides with the appearance of a man whose skeleton is similar to
ours in its rigorously straight carriage and its light boned facial structure.”
Ibid., p. 18.
3 Ibid., p. 25.
4 Ibid., p. 11.
5 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. R. Hurley
(New York: Zone Books, 1992), p. 17-18.
6 Freud applies a similar notion to
the infant. He writes, “An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his
ego from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon
him.” Sigmund Freud, Civilizations and
its Discontents, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 13-14.
7 Theory of Religion, p. 19.
8 Ibid., p. 27.
9 Ibid., p. 30-31.
10 Ibid., p. 31.
11 Ibid.
12 Georges Bataille, Essential Writings, ed. M. Richardson
(London: Sage, 1998), p. 18.
13 Ibid.
14 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. L. A. Boldt
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), p 83.
15 An interesting image is conjured
up when one combines Bataille’s image of animal immanence as water in water and this quote from Arthur Schopenhauer: “Just as
the boatman sits in his small boat, trusting his frail craft in a stormy sea
that is boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling,
mountainous waves, so in the midst of a world full of suffering and misery the
individual man calmly sits, supported by and trusting the principium individuationis, or the way in which the individual
knows things as phenomenon (352-353).” The water here is the immanent world of
the animal, and the boat (no doubt made with tools) is the world of the human. Arthur
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and
Representation, Vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne, (New York: Dover, 1966), p.
352-353.
16 Plato, The Republic, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Barnes & Noble,
1999), p. 209.
17 Ibid., p. 210.
18 Ibid., p. 300.
19 Ibid., p. 301.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., p. 302.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 303.
24 Here, I am thinking of the
philosophical unraveling of Platonism, beginning with Immanuel Kant, which led
to the thought of, among others, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich
Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille, and other modern French thinkers,
each one further questioning the viability of the Platonist take on the human world.
25 The Republic, p. 301.
26
27 Ibid., p. 86-87.
28 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism
and Consumer Society”, The
Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Washington:
Bay Press, 1983), p. 114.
29 Ibid., p.119.