Origins and ends

Origins and ends

Against the backdrop of Josephine Baker, the birth of French ethnology, Surrealism, jazz, and the new found obsession with Oceania, the major- ity inter-war artists and intellectuals, from the Surrealists to Lévy-Bruhl, were part of a new French bourgeoisie who lauded primitivism, but kept

a safe and specular distance from it. This primitivism emerged not from

a desire to universalize, but rather to afi rm and dei ne the bourgeois as a class of new moderns whose modernism was dependent upon their sustained gaze on the Other, who was fetishized and specularly colonized.

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Bataille was certainly not immune to such tendencies. However, his embrace of the primitive did move beyond the colonial and the oriental- ist and, by virtue of his desire to collapse the distance of the avant-garde gaze and épater le bourgeois, he also collapsed the distance between the primitive and the modern tout court. In other words, unlike Durkheim, Bataille was not content to simply identify the elementary form as a key to scientifically understanding the morphology of contemporary societies, but rather sought to avenge contemporary society through a heuristic of primitive alterity that could function as a critical aesthetic tool. The ques- tion for Bataille was not to examine the evolution of social formations from their archaic origins to the present, but rather to affirm the existence of an archaic substrate within the present and hence not preclude the possibility of a modern anti-modernism that would be naked and fiery. He opposed the primitive to the modern in order to crush the absolutes of nation- alism, progress, utility, race, and religion, upon which societies erected themselves. In an early 1930 review of G.H. Luquet’s L’Art Primitif for Documents, he thus praised the primitive’s capacity to destroy the objects of objective reality through a progressive aesthetic alteration that lodged the object into the world of the non-human; art was not only a violation, but that which moved by the successive destruction of the universe, engen- dering the most sadistic of libidinal instincts; art harnesses nothing, but rather gives free reign to the instincts which propel man into immanent flow through decomposition of the real (Bataille 1970:353). However, the paroxysm of Bataille’s primitive aesthetic would come with the opening in 1948 of the Caves of Lascaux, containing more than two thousand paleo- lithic signs, among which the most celebrated were found in the “Hall of

Bulls.” 10 For Bataille, the caves were an imagined locus for the lost site of immanence where the “new man,” (who was of another time), the sover- eign man of art, committed the first artistic act. And, in his own anthropo- archaology, the signs were inscriptions telling of the agonizing transition from animal to man. In Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art, he thus argues:

Two decisive events mark the beginning of the course of the world; the i rst is the birth of the tool (of work); the second is the birth of art (of play). The tool is of homo faber who, no longer being an animal, is not quite a man either . . . the birth of art emerges with the existence of the tool. Not only does art assume the existence of tools and the know-how to make them and wield them, but there is also, in relationship to utility, the value of opposition: it is

a protest against the world that once existed, but without which the protest would have no force. (Bataille 1955a:27)

The origins of art are found in the traumatic transition from a pure space of immanence and non-utility to one constituted by the introduction of the tool, which is also the introduction of time, death, finitude, and

taboo. 11 Art is, from its earliest inception, pure agon and precisely the confrontation with a new human world organized upon the instantiation

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of the taboo, which bars the possibility of free “communication with the spirits”; whence the strained images of hybrid man-animals who become cognizant of the new division of the universe between the worlds of work and play, and enter into new modes of “primitive classification” that create a series of interdictions between the universes. The birth of art is also the birth of the transgression and de facto, the birth of the sacred and the profane. The first paintings are ritualizations of immanent being over- come by the transcendent, where far from being an animal among other animals, man becomes he who transgresses the animal domain in the hunt, breaking the newly established taboo on murder, a transgression that is expiated in the birth of art. Paleolithic expiation, on the level of the representation, meant dissolving the human figure before the animal and entering into the infinite symphony of animals, confirming that “man’s superiority is only technical,” an affair of the tool; but not completely absorbed by the world of the tool and human project, Paleolithic man also recognized that the animal “was graced with a force that was not his,” that the animal was in fact “superior to man in a multitude of ways . . . in direct contact with the forces of divinity, closer to the forces of nature, which he freely incarnates . . . it is above all a fact of civilization that the éleveur is himself inferior” (Bataille 1955a:126). In the drawings, humans sought to partake in the prestige of the animal in an attempt to rally against the imposed distinction between the two orders while lamenting the inevitable adieu to the animal and, perhaps, registering an intuition of the future loss that would follow. The entrance into symbolic and properly aesthetic life, a source of deep anguish, is exemplified by the infamous homme du puits, a bird-headed ithyphallic body standing before

a wounded bison, forming a dispositif of human sexuality, reproduction, death, and religious, agricultural, and economic life. Perhaps he is a shaman in a trance, perhaps a wounded hunter, but what is striking for Bataille is the difference in the representation of the animal and the man, one which signals the separation of two aesthetic economies; the bison is depicted with “intellectual realism,” appearing “naturalist” before the human figure (ibid.:117).

Bataille’s second monograph on art for Albert Skira concerned not the origins of art, but rather the origins of modern art. In Critique, he had already examined the suspended time that impressionist painting often evoked and the definitively modern anxieties that resonated under its play of points and color (Bataille 2008:375). Manet’s silences and his own sovereign-silent subversion in art were not only the origin of a modern ethos, but also the foundation of the modern apophatic aesthetic which was the completion of the process initiated at Lascaux. Art would no longer represent sovereignty in exaggerated symbols of divinity, royalty; but rather pervert these codes by setting them in relationship with indis- cussable realities, and a silence that evades utility in its fatigue with civi- lization. In Manet’s toreadors, barmaids, bourgeois couples at the park,

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and Olympia, a looming ugliness is introduced onto the painterly surface which outs the abject horror at the core of the contemporary middle class and the fallen aristocracy. It is precisely in Manet’s will to truth that his painting becomes sovereign and naturalistically embraces the obscenity of human nature, the dirty little secret that is locked away in all bourgeois life is always evoked. But the result is not a dramatic reckoning with the negative, but rather the apophatic “play of indifference” on the level of the painterly. For instance, Manet’s Olympia places in relief the “internal conflict of the bourgeois. The aristocratic world has lost its vigor for life and bourgeois conformism can only maintain it in empty forms” (Bataille

1955b:60). The “scandal of Olympia” was the acting out of this conflict which simultaneously mocked modes of classical beauty, while announc- ing a rupture with the aesthetic norms of the past. Glacial, Manet’s Olympia is the “secret, the silence of the bedroom,” where one gleans the “flatness of violence,” and, although “almost a crime or the spectacle of death,” everything “slips into the indifference of beauty (ibid.:74). The scandal of Olympia, a simple nude “goddess” being attended to by her Black servant, is the scandal of bourgeois reality itself. Manet’s characters are not only indifferent, but also resigned to a world that goes nowhere, inhabited by the last men who frolic indifferently and simply await the catastrophe. Severed from immanence, they cannot communicate at all; their silences, far from being erotic, are truly empty or defined by the ulti- mate absence of the sacred. The force of Manet’s work lies in the despair of this silent indifference, its capacity to be natural and reveal the malaise of impossibility through simply depicting, not deforming, the nudity of the bourgeois at the twilight hour of the world. Moreover, for Bataille, Manet’s own indifference toward bourgeois mores is the condition of his own sovereignty, which, characterized by a “sober elegance” which can

be cultivated in a “new region where only a deep silence reigns, where art is the supreme value . . . art, in general, this is to individual, autonomous man, detached of all enterprise, of all given systems and of individual- ism itself” (ibid.:64). In confounding Manet with his pictorial universe of “supreme indifference,” Bataille was also arguing for the total denud- ing of bourgeois civilization which could potentially lead to the point of sovereign detachment, a detachment that can come only out of the dis- enchantment that flows through Parisian parks and brasseries as a silent energy, buzzing under the din. Manet’s sovereign gesture was to be of this world, which he represented, but in thorough disregard of its values and constraints. The dialectic of history is then one where Paleolithic man severs himself from the animal to become civilized only to force civi- lized man to leave civilization for another sovereign site which is neither animal nor human, but simply enveloped in silence. Sovereignty for the last man may not be Dionysian or Acephalic, but simply a question of evaporating into indifference or cultivating a solitude which can be the only protest against modern decadence.

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