Reading Thoughts and Notes
The Accursed Share, Bataille
On paper

Summary
Bataille makes an argument that the fundamental macroeconomic nature of systems is one founded on two choices: grow, or waste. The systems that govern men are also governed by the inevitability of growth or waste, and our economic understanding must reflect this. Profit, an excess, can only be used for either of those means. He also views life as an expanding bubble of pressure, an exuberance whose pressure, if not dissipated, bursts in often violent ways. This, he argues, caused the two world wars. Finally, he addresses that although in the “general” view of economics, life is in excess and this excess must be dealt with, from a “particular” view life can be scarce, impoverished, and limited.

Compelling Points
Dealing with excess of wealth can be as fundamental as the dynamics of scarcity in economics
Life is a process of Scarcity → Growth → Excess → Luxury, Raised Standards → Scarcity
Death makes room for growth
We grow and then when we reach our limits of growth begin to shift our focus toward sexual reproduction, then begin to fear death because our mechanisms for growth have been exhausted

Implications
What happens if we do not dispose of excess? How is growth in itself not a way of disposing of excess, and if it is, then how is there ever any pressure in this system if we either grow or waste? How does excess manifest itself? It can be stored as fat, as in Bataille’s example of the calf. But this is growth, not excess. It is excess to the human; growth to the calf. There always exists some perspective from which excess is growth and not excess. Say we choose the human perspective, and begin to channel all excess resources into fattening calves – storing excess. Is this a pressure on the system? Will WWIII break out?

Perhaps yes, it is a pressure on the system because the machinery and resources required to maintain the fattening of the calves require the resources to be turned into excesses that maintain those systems. I am not sure.

It feels like Bataille’s perspective is drenched in capitalism and assumes that no world is possible without ever increasing growth – a capitalist axiom – because the author can’t imagine and has never experienced another. But I can imagine other worlds. There is a world where humanity does not grow or where growth declines. Where humanity values something other than more for the sake of more, and despite life’s fundamental propensity for making more of itself, where humans learn to value what we have instead of more of ourselves. Especially if this shift in values allows us to exist with what we have for longer than unrestricted growth does. We have an unprecedented power to predict the limits of our world-engulfing consumption that no other species of distributed cognition was able to predict.

In Bataille’s world, there are boundless resources. There are no bottlenecks. There is no macroeconomic scarcity because the sun does not cease to shine. But there are many other inputs to this world than the sun and they are far more finite than the energy of the sun. Life does not exist everywhere there is energy. This seems to be Bataille’s foundation, but we have seen through careful catalogs of the skies: it is false. Thus, we must use our power of prediction to contend with these limits. We cannot base our models on Bataille’s false assumptions of the boundless exuberant pressures of life. Life is bounded by more than solar energy, and we see it in the millions of desolate planets, orbiting boundless solar energy.

Thus it is not only a possibility to imagine worlds other than Bataille’s model of growth, it is imperative. When there are limits to growth, systems premised on excesses of future generations will fail. We must relearn what we value to include our predicted limits of growth, and to learn to contend with scarcity. Scarcity was not always fearsome. It does not imply death. Absence defines presence; scarcity need not invoke fear. There is a world where instead of investing in the promise of more wealth in the future, you invest in the promise of continued prosperity, invest in the promise of longevity, invest in the promise of efficient redistribution and utilization of what is, better definitions of what is using the means that are.