Page 175 - Cultural Theory

Edwards-3516-Ch-09.qxd 5/9/2007 5:56 PM Page 164

••• William Merrin •••

anthropology, Caillois especially in his 1939 book Man and the Sacred (Caillois, 1980),
and Bataille in a series of early essays (Bataille, 1985) and later books such as The
Accursed Share (Bataille, [1949] 1985), Eroticism [1957] (1962) and Theory of Religion
[1973] (1992). What unifies this tradition, and what Baudrillard takes as the basis for
the ‘symbolic’, is the emphasis upon a mode of collective experience or social rela-
tionship and its immediate moment of meaning and communication. Durkheim’s
description of the ‘sacred’ is the exemplar here – not as a truly religious condition but
instead as a real transformation of the individual and a higher experience in tribal
festivities caused by the excited, violent, active experience with others of a collective
‘state of effervescence’. In such religious festivals, raised beyond the profane world of
everyday labour and survival, the individual feels themselves ‘transported into a spe-
cial world … filled with exceptionally intense forces that take hold of him and meta-
morphose him’ (Durkheim, 1915: 218). The communion of the group transforms the
individual in the moment.
Another example of these social relationships and mode of communion is found
in Mauss’s theory of the ‘gift’ (don), based on his study of the primitive exchange sys-
tem founded on the divestment, not accumulation, of wealth, itself closely tied to
tribal festivities and the sacred. The scene of the gift is important here as it both cre-
ates positive social relations, as the gift communicates the giver and cements ties,
while also prompting an agonistic cyclical competition in which individuals or
groups attempt to accrue social power and rank by humbling the other with the gen-
erosity of their gift, creating an indebtedness only effaced with a greater counter-gift.
Mauss drew implicitly anti-economistic implications from this, seeing the gift rela-
tionship as producing a social scene and meaning since lost in the reduction of
humanity to the ‘calculating machine’, homo oeconomicus (Mauss and Hubert, 1966:
74), and the College of Sociology developed this critique of the contemporary world
as one defined by the loss of a mode of collective experience (with Bataille identify-
ing the victory of Christianity, the Protestant Reformation, industrial capitalism
and the rational-scientific world-view as key contributors to this process), and by
an impoverished, individualistic ‘restricted’ economy in which the energies and
resources of life itself are reduced and hoarded not squandered for pleasure (see
Bataille, 1991).
Baudrillard is the leading heir of this tradition (see Merrin, 1999a), unifying its con-
ception of this mode of relations as ‘symbolic exchange’, extending both its analysis
of the destruction of this mode in contemporary Western societies, in his critique of
semiotic consumption, and its anti-economism, in his related critique of the system
of ‘general political economy’ in The Consumer Society (1998a) and essays of that
period (1981). The critique of political economy begins with the rejection of the still
popularly dominant model of consumption which sees it as a natural and inevitable
process, based on hypothesizing an individual ‘subject’ alone in nature with funda-
mental ‘needs’ which must be satisfied for survival and happiness, for example, by
a system of production to serve these primary needs (1998a: 69). Resisting the
Marcusian option of criticizing ‘false’ needs created by capitalism (Marcuse, 1986:
4–5), Baudrillard opts instead for the more radical line of rejecting the very concept of
• 164 •