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In esoteric Christianity, to choose a starting point, the notion of the Fall denotes that of pre-physical spirit/consciousness, the fall of pure spirit into the bonds of matter. It was a Fall into the enslavement of physical restraints and pragmatics; as well as physical needs and desires (the fallen angels were first cast out of heaven because of a desire to sit closer to God).
Numerous strains of religious thought have stressed the goal of liberation from material enslavement and most especially from desire, which is in effect the front line of material and bodily enslavement; thus the Franciscan vows of poverty, the hindhu-buddhist concept of nirvana, (achieving the absence of desire) etc.
While death, the final shrugging off of the body, was often considered the ultimate liberation, there is inevitably a quest for liberation on earth. Such a quest must work through the constraints of matter, through personal or political means.
I will use this dialectic as a model of oppression and liberation which the following thinkers have to some extent, intentionally or otherwise, addressed. All focussed on desire and its personal or social politics.
Breton's Surrealism
Andre Breton, surrealist "leader", poet and spokesperson, himself adopted the concept of a Fall. His Fall was Plato's notion of a hermaphroditic humankind split asunder into the male and female sexes; forever tortured by their separateness and a hunger to re-unite. Sexual unity (ie the act of sex) was the means of liberation from this purgatory.
Breton promoted a kind of intellectual (if not actual) hedonism. Spiritual uplift would be sought even at the expense of the body or through the destruction or devouring of things. Beauty was something not to be contemplated but to be seized and possessed. Heaven was perhaps something to be created in the head rather than "on earth" as is sought in the hard(er) politics and economics of Adorno or Battaille.
The surrealist quest was to de-realise the world, to undermine pragmatic codings through concepts of absurdity and surreality. Surreality was a fusion of dream and reality, a utopia of free action for repressed, unconscious desire. Their goals were voluptuousness and disorder, to attack structures, solidity, matter. A key factor in surrealist imagery was the device of fragmentation of forms and montage (a fragmentation of contexts?).
A number of the Surrealists were active communists. The condition of capitalism was identified as being the condition of war. It denied any experience outside the function of production. Economic rationalism ignored psychological and spiritual costing. Having identified the oppressor as the political system, Breton deemed that all art must be revolutionary.
Bellmer
Hans Bellmer too was interested in desire; and in transgression against oppression and containment of a slightly different kind. The departure point for Breton (or the point where Breton gets off and Bellmer and Bataille keep going) was marked by the shit-stained pants in Dali's "The Lugubrious Game". Breton could be considered after all a bit boring, lost in the idea of liberation in conventional, amorous sexuality and thus failing to escape the containment represented by sexual and social conventions.
Bellmer and Bataille chose to follow the course of desire beyond such conventions, confronting taboos, seeking to break psychological ground rather than identify and celebrate mundane aspirations.
Bellmer's doll pieces broke up and contorted sexual forms, in general the body-effigies of young girls. He invented fantasies of criminal acts, ugliness, rape, torture, destruction of the precious, seeking to challenge and disturb.
The fetishising of body parts and fragmentation of the sexual form ignored the constraints of physical actuality. Disjointedness promoted concepts of physical impossibility. As a subject, the dolls served to subvert the technology of photography, traditionally regarded as a signpost to reality.
Bellmer's sense of taboo lay not in what convention condemned but what was hidden in the darkness of the psyche (where it is far from safe). Bellmer's psychological confrontation and violence may constitute a spiritual jolt that liberates from habit and known codings. He dragged terrible desires out of the darkness and into cognition so that we could assimilate the full reality of our passions and the content of evil in them. How else were we to transcend them (in whatever way we ought) if not by first knowing them?
Bataille
Bataille was interested in destruction, horror and violence (as well as sex of course) but in a more actual (let's do it) sense. Destruction was the missing, unseen half of the economy of life. It was the other side of the bourgeois/capitalist economy of production, which he identified as the oppressor, the forger of the bonds of matter. The endless production of matter, of goods, was the process of stultification, solidity, fixedness, uniformity, unchangingness and entrenchment.
Battaille promoted the view of a very non-solid universe. He saw the world as "what passes from one to the other when we laugh or cry". He encoded body parts as eruptions of pure dynamic energy, and the body as merely an envelope containing and exchanging energy. He concocted the myth of the Pineal Eye which, as evolution progressed, would burst from the human forehead, only to be immediately blinded by the energy and brilliance of the sun, whereupon man would fall back to the ground, expired, his transitory physical tenancy expired.
Bataille's anthropology went in search of who we are outside present social forms and exchanges. The earliest training of a child is to control its orofaces. Bataille maintained that we are merely a system of orofaces, prohibitions and inhibitions. He saw bodily expulsions, even a gob of spittle on the ground, as revolutionary, transgressive, transcendent. Expulsion or destruction represented the liberating of solid forms, including one's own body and one's own subjectivity (self) into pure energy, or at least some gaseous or fluid form. By this chaos of change we are joined in, not isolated from, "the unconditional splendour of all things", our subjectivity and separateness vanishes.
In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches...(1)
Like Adorno and like the Surrealists, Bataille rails against utilitarian economics. An economics based solely on production creates more and more solidity. It is constipated, retentive, life-denying. He sought a broader economy of life where creation is matched by destruction, where all forms are fleeting and change is the only constant. To participate in the economy of life is to expunge, release, explode, expend. Value is attributed to the unproductive or destructive act. The notion of sacrifice is in fact the production of sacred things (2) (eg. blood of Christ, blood of the martyrs). The killing of gods and taboos is also the way of transgression and transformation. Politically, the great act would be slaughter of the Bourgeoisie and the erasure of their constipative hoarding economy:
..sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption in the course of which the asexual noble heads of the bourgeois will be chopped off. (3)
The future is born when the past is destroyed. It lies not in a new order but in permanent revolution, chaos, continuous fall and rearrangement. The only true order is rhythm, a cycle of change at every scale, as the microsign of anus relates to macrosign of sun, coitus relates to the earth's rotation, to the rise and fall of life, the leaping up and returning to the ocean of flying fish, the rising up and erectness of man leading only to the pinnacle of his blinding by the sun and his falling again to the ground.
Adorno & Horkheimer's "Dialectic of Enlightenment"
The Dialectic of Enlightenment is the story of a quest for liberation gone wrong. The quest for enlightenment was the conquest of nature and the overthrow of mystery. However, in solving the riddle of nature, we are left facing the riddle of technology.(4)
"Man" sought to categorise the universal terrain, so scientific method, rational analysis, could be applied to everything. The sovereignty of man was founded in knowledge. Knowledge led to and was further enhanced by technology, which became the instrument of domination. Power rooted in technology established technocracy (technological power hierarchy).
Man separated himself from nature. Rather than subject, nature became object, made alien. Men payed for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercised their power. As the quest for knowledge and power took on the form of war against nature, man declared war upon himself. The man/nature split became a mind/body split. Man alienated his own physical/animal aspect. The body became both machine (a tool in the process of production and advancement) and the animal body the subject of experiment, control, vivisection.(5) In the process of turning nature into substance and matter, "nothing is allowed to live"(6). In seeking to dominate, man became victim. Respect for the animal and the animal in man was a betrayal of progress. Woman too was objectified within the field of nature by the male dominated technocracy. The empowering of woman would have represented an equal betrayal.(7)
These dichotomies led to an attitude to social divisions, the division of labour. The exploited body was evil (though also the object of desire and repression) while the higher spiritual pursuits and values allowed to non-labour classes were "good".
Politically, Adorno and Horkheimer departed from historical class war arguments, perhaps glimpsing a new dialectic. Capitalism and the state capitalism that passed for socialism were lumped together as sharing the same flaws - their technological/industrial base, their race for progress and material development.
The writers are obscure on the point, but liberation, such as it can be, perhaps lay somewhere in liberating the mind of the individual. It may be the liberated mind then lent itself toward the problem of liberating (or deconstructing) social structure?
5/6/91
1. The Solar Anus p.6 2. The Notion of Expenditure p.119 3. The Solar Anus p.8 4. after Virilio. 5. Man and Animal p.245 6. Importance of the Body p.233 7. Man and Animal p.254© David Nerlich 1991
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