Abstract
This article draws on Georges Bataille’s concept of transgression, a key element in Bataille’s theory of the sacred, to highlight structural implications of the way the self-empowerment ethos of new technologies suffuses the digital tracking culture. Pointing to the original conceptual stance of transgression, worked out against prohibition, I first argue that, beyond a critique of new technologies’ promise of self-empowerment as coming at the expense of an acknowledgement of the ultimate taboo—death—is the problem of the sanitizing of the tension between the crossing of the line of the symbolic taboo and prohibition; this undermines a “libidinal investment” towards the sacred, which is central in Bataille’s theory. Second, focussing on “eroticism”, since this embodies the emancipative potential of the Bataillean sacred, I argue that while a fear of eroticism marks out the digital technological realm, this is covered up by the blurring of boundaries between pleasure, fun and sex(iness) that currently governs our experience with technological devices.
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- 1.
- 2.
Gauchet (1997).
- 3.
Gauthier and Martikainen (2013b).
- 4.
Gauthier and Martikainen (2013b), p, 15. For Gauthier and Martikainen, consumerism succeeds in shaping new ways of relating to the sacred, since consumerism amplifies a modern cultural trend that has developed over centuries through the awakening of the “primacy of authenticity”, “individuation” and “increasing appeal to emotions”; all of which ascribes a central role in the subject’s life to the “self-realization” ethos. The growing attention paid to the individual as an emotional being, endowed with interiority, thinking of him/herself without referring to a supra order can be traced back to Saint Augustine according to the authors.
- 5.
Fletcher (1913).
- 6.
See McGonigal’s website: https://janemcgonigal.com. Accessed 01 Aug 2018.
- 7.
Greenfield (2017), p. 31.
- 8.
Kull (2006), p. 786.
- 9.
Szerszynski (2005).
- 10.
By “spirit of our time” I refer to Max Weber, who, in The Protestant Ethic uses the expression “anima” to capture the Geist, the dynamics behind any capitalist forms, predispositions and distinctive devices; this “anima” amount to “a collective psycho-moral disposition”, according to Appadurai (2011).
- 11.
Giddens (1991).
- 12.
Bataille (1979).
- 13.
The Accursed Share (1988a), in which Bataille unfolds his theoretical work on a “general economy”, was intended to include, alongside a first part (The Consumption), two other parts: History of the Eroticism and The Sovereignty. Bataille’s project was to juxtapose the last two parts, although published at a later stage, with The Consumption, and is indicative of the philosopher’s venture to bring theories of the sacred and of religion, as well as of the general economy, under a single broader theoretical umbrella. In this regard, notions such as “excess”, “sacrifice” or “flow of energy” are central, both in Bataille’s theory of economy and of religion.
- 14.
For a discussion on Bataille’s conception of economy, situated between a “general economy” and political economy, see Sørensen’s (2012) article, On a Universal Scale: Economy in Bataille’s General Economy.
- 15.
- 16.
Gauthier and Martikainen (2013a), p. 9.
- 17.
Hearn (2008), pp. 163–183.
- 18.
Gauthier and Martikainen (2013a), p. 13.
- 19.
Mitchell, and Winfree (2009), pp. 1–17.
- 20.
- 21.
Hegarty (2000), p. 61.
- 22.
Later in the text, Bataille suggests the idea that, in spite of a natural repugnance for the dead, a “horrible attraction” for the dead body can be envisioned since it is a projection of our attraction not for the dead body in itself, but for murder. The hypothesis, grounded in Bataille’s suggestion that “mightn’t the prohibition on corpses turn out to be an extension of the prohibition on murder?” (p. 98) contributes to Bataille’s effort to account for the primitive state of frenzy that combines death, eroticism and murder.
- 23.
Bataille (1991), p. 97.
- 24.
Bataille (1988a), p. 96.
- 25.
Hegarty (2000), p. 57.
- 26.
Bataille (1985).
- 27.
“Self knowledge through numbers” is the slogan of the organization created by Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelley in 2007, as they began the project to track all the new tracking technologies to allow users and makers of tracking tools to share their experiences on online platforms.
- 28.
Morozov (2013). Morozov uses the term “solutionism” to denounce an ideology that legitimizes over-simplified ways to break down complex problems into neat, fixed, computable solutions through technology.
- 29.
Morozov (2013), p. 270.
- 30.
Morozov (2013), p. 269.
- 31.
Harvey (2013), p. 15.
- 32.
Gauthier and Martikainen (2013b), p. 15.
- 33.
Noys (2000), p. 27.
- 34.
According to Hollier (1990) for Hegel “architecture has not even a hint of motion. Its main purpose, as the article ‘Informe’ said, is to provide what exists with a ‘formal coat, a mathematical overcoat’: a form that veils the incompletion that death, in its nakedness, introduces into life.”
- 35.
Castoriadis (1996); In The Rise of Insignificance, Greek philosopher and social theorist Cornelius Castoriadis warns that capitalist societies tend to evade thinking about death by suppressing the process of mourning. However, “working-through freedom is intrinsically linked with the working-through of mortality” (1996, p. 77) asserts Castoriadis, seeing mortality as a prerequisite for autonomy in societies.
- 36.
Butler (2004), pp. xix–xx.
- 37.
Bataille (1988a), p. 96; For Bataille, putrefaction materializes a morally unacceptable feeling for primitive peoples: the humiliation experiences at the very moment when the “visit of death” is thrust upon them. Even worse than the distress of personal annihilation through death is, according to the philosopher, the period of time when the flesh rots (see Bataille (1988a), p. 80).
- 38.
Bataille (1991), p. 80.
- 39.
Bell and Gemmell (2010), p. 8.
- 40.
Morozov (2013) explains using the term “solutionism” to depict digital makers’ obsession for statistics, algorithms and numbers to “fix” complex problems, by drawing on the domain of architecture and urban planning; and ironically echoes Bataille’s insight on the covering up of death in relation to architecture.
- 41.
Bataille (1992), p. 9.
- 42.
The intrusion of technology into this world of “immediacy or immanence” (Bataille, Theory of Religion, 17), the “birth of the first tool”, sets a precedent through which humanity is conceived as a means to an end. “The tool brings exteriority into the world” (Bataille, Theory of Religion, 27) and marks the dawn of discontinuity. See Tomasi (2008), pp. 1–12.
- 43.
Bataille (1988a), pp. 77–78.
- 44.
Greenfield (2017), p. 65.
- 45.
Hegarty (2003), p. 102.
- 46.
Bataille (1988a), pp. 77–78.
- 47.
Greenfield (2017), p. 33.
- 48.
See http://adigaskell.org/2015/11/06/wearable-technology-for-menstruation-support. Accessed 01 Aug 2018.
- 49.
Bataille (1991).
- 50.
Arppe (2009), p. 43.
- 51.
Bataille is influenced by Kojève’s (1969) “anthropogenic desire” and phenomenological existentialist reading of Hegel’s dialectic. Kojève stresses how the existential forces of desire, and the lack of struggle for recognition, instantiate the self as subject. Yet Bataille is also loyal to Freudian concepts of “repression”, “transference”, “displacement” and “sublimation” in positing the dual movement in transgression, the suspension of the taboo as displacement that opens up to new gratification (i.e. pleasure and desire).
- 52.
Mitchell and Winfree (2009), p. 84
- 53.
Stiegler (2011), pp. 52–61.
- 54.
Stiegler (2011), p. 53.
- 55.
Sadin (2015).
- 56.
Simondon (1992), pp. 297–319.
- 57.
Stiegler (2009), p. 48.
- 58.
Stiegler (2009), p. 48.
- 59.
Husserl (1991).
- 60.
Stiegler engages with the work of French palaeontologist André Leroi-Gourhan to theorize the human animal as primarily technical; the structure of the human body and brain is shaped by his technical milieu. Likely, for Stiegler what constitutes the phenomenon of hominization is the exteriorization of memory through the technical object, understood as “memory-object”. Technics are forms of the materialization of experience; they are the “spatialization of the time of consciousness beyond consciousness”.
- 61.
Stiegler uses Husserl’s definition of the term “flux”, which means the time of the object’s passing, such as a melody, film or radio broadcast.
- 62.
Bell and Gemmell (2010), p. 87.
- 63.
Stiegler (2011), p. 58.
- 64.
My translation. The original French title is: Gilbert Simondon’s L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (1966). The original French text is: L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique.
- 65.
Deleuze (2001), p. 44.
- 66.
Deleuze (2001), p. 44.
- 67.
Simondon (1992), pp. 310–311.
- 68.
Stiegler (2009), p. 48.
- 69.
Stiegler (2009), p. 48.
- 70.
Deleuze (2001), p. 44.
- 71.
Morozov (2013), p. 346.
- 72.
Stiegler (2011).
- 73.
Bataille (1989), pp. 32–33.
- 74.
“Play” in Bataille’s original French text is “mettre en jeu”, which literally means to put one’s self in play. “Play” shall be understood in the context of the example of the lovers, whose encounter is, for Bataille, coincidence, gamble and risk rather than calculation.
- 75.
Bataille (1988), p. 109.
- 76.
Morozov (2013), p. 227.
- 77.
Morozov (2013), p. 226.
- 78.
Byung-Chul (2017), p. 59.
- 79.
Doyle (2012).
- 80.
Doyle (2012).
- 81.
For instance, researchers have designed models to measure different arrays of affects and emotions (love vs. hate) in users’ interaction with the digital objects.
- 82.
Blythe and Hassenzahl (2003), p. 67.
- 83.
Introduced by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, drive, although translated by Strachey as Trieb, distinguishes itself from instinct. Lacan (1990) suggests that Trieb shall be understood as “drift”. Indeed, “Drive is not of the order of hunger or thirst, appearing on the basis of the natural rhythms of the body. Drive emerges as a constant force that expresses itself as a continual demand for satisfaction” (Dravers 2011, p. 123). In Suffocated Desire (2011) which I quoted earlier, Bernard Stiegler uses the Freudian term “drive” as opposed to desire to criticize the way consumerism, brands and digital technologies appeal to individuals’ compulsion to buy and consume at the expense of more highly symbolic and culturally oriented activities.
- 84.
Ferrara (2012).
- 85.
Zichermann and Cunningham (2011), p. 41.
- 86.
Goriunova (2014), p. 9
- 87.
Bataille (1989), p. 66.
- 88.
Doyle (2012).
- 89.
In the History of Eroticism (1991) the philosopher’s insight on the figure of the prostitute follows considerations on frenzy and the ritual orgy as multiple embodiments of eroticism relegated by Christianity to the side of the impure (i.e. the profane) and a definitive object of reprobation, such as paganism’s celebration of the Sabbath, “like an essence of evil” (Bataille 1991, p. 133).
- 90.
Bataille (1988a), p. 133.
- 91.
Bataille (1987), p. 18.
- 92.
Gemerchak (2003), p. 201.
- 93.
Gemerchak (2003), p. 201
- 94.
Goriunova (2014).
- 95.
Stiegler (2011).
- 96.
Bataille (1987), p. 29.
- 97.
Bataille’s sacred entails an emancipative feature, which brought Caillois (1950) to depict a “radical sacred” in Bataille’s theory. Bataille’s sacred emancipative dimension interestingly echoes Castoriadis’ concept of radical imagination. Grounded in the work of the psyche that generates a “spontaneous flux of representations, affects and desires” (Castoriadis 1987, p. 26) the radical imagination is the catalyst by which individuals-subjects break away from the deterministic logic of the social order. In doing so, Castoriadis envisions the shattering process of calling into question the power of the “other” (e.g. kings, chiefs, elites) as fundamental in the establishment of autonomous societies.
- 98.
Gemerchak (2003), p. 186
- 99.
Roberts-Hughes (2017), pp. 157–168.
- 100.
Gauthier (2009), p. 142.
- 101.
Graeber (2015).
- 102.
Graeber (2015), p. 60.
- 103.
- 104.
Becci (2015), p. 153.
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Righi, C. (2020). New Technologies’ Promise to the Self and the Becoming of the Sacred: Insights from Georges Bataille’s Concept of Transgression. In: Hensold, J., Kynes, J., Öhlmann, P., Rau, V., Schinagl, R., Taleb, A. (eds) Religion in Motion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41388-0_6
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