Page 108 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Economy 91

the exchange of goods was not a mechanical but a moral transaction,
bringing about and maintaining human, personal, relationships between
individuals and groups.
(Mauss 1969: ix)

Though gift giving persists under capitalism, it is subsumed with an
overarching economic rationality.
Entertainment media are poised between sacred gifts and economic
calculations. In the animated world of Destination Earth, with its corporate
sponsors and capitalist propaganda, the secret, sacred gift—oil—is celebrated
as the ultimate standard of value. Oil is represented as a gift, as something
that is just given, as a natural resource that is available everywhere for
anyone and everyone. Though the film draws a stark opposition between the
economic systems of totalitarian communism and free-market capitalism,
Destination Earth actually represents a gift economy, an economy based on
“moral transactions” of competition that promise to transform “relationships
between individuals and groups” from oppressive conformity into liberating
and unlimited freedom.
While invoking the moral, transformative, and even redemptive power
of the gift, the entire range of media operating in a capitalist economy
also celebrate the power of extravagant expenditure, which the perverse
Durkheimian theorist Georges Bataille identified as the heart of a general
economy that was based not on production but on loss, on a sacrificial
expenditure of material and human resources. For Bataille, the general
economy of capitalism was ultimately about meaning, but meaning had to
be underwritten by sacrificial acts of expenditure, with the loss as great as
possible, in order to certify authenticity (Bataille 1985).
Obviously, entertainment media thrive within this general economy
of expenditure. Big-budget extravaganzas, exorbitant publicity, and trans-
gressive superstars all participate. However, this sacrificial economy, based
on loss, also demands sacrificial victims. Underscoring this point, Georges
Bataille proposed to revitalize the society and economy of France in the
1930s by officiating over a human sacrifice in Paris. Though he found a
volunteer, Bataille was frustrated by the Parisian municipal authorities who
refused a permit for this sacrificial ritual. In nationalist rhetoric and popular
media, however, this impetus of redemptive sacrifice is a common, recurring
motif, with many heroic individuals, from Jesus to Bruce Willis, willingly
sacrificing their own lives so that others might live. However, the sacrificial
victim does not have to be a willing victim. In Destination Earth, as we have
seen, the dictator Ogg is killed, effortlessly but necessarily to bring freedom
to his people by liberating their oil.