demands of Americans that they lucidly grasp the necessity, for an economy such as theirs, of having a margin of profitless operations
. An
immense industrial network cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a tire
....
It expresses
a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it cannot limit,
and whose laws it cannot ignore without
consequences.
Woe to those who, to the very end, insist on regulating the movement that exceeds them
with the narrow mind of the mechanic who changes a tire.
At: utility focus / work
Their obsession with utility creates a dialectical schema which sublimates the “unproductive” realm of
the sacred under the contours of profane civility. This telos of productivity only internalizes mortal
anxiety.
Biles 2011
(Jeremy Biles – PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School, "The Remains of God:
Bataille/Sacrifice/Community", Culture, Theory and Critique, 2011, 52(2–3), 127–144 – ERW)
All
such
expenditures
– useless, diverted from any utilitarian ends
– obviously ‘
go against judgments that
form the basis of a rational economy’
(Bataille 1991: 22). Indeed, the imperative to waste and the related glorious modes of
expenditure that fascinate Bataille are inimical to the calculations that define a restricted economy based on the tenets of limited resources and
concern for securing future interests. But it
is this consideration of the future, of advantageous utility, that deprives
humans of sovereignty.
Sovereignty,
by Bataille’s account, is
linked with experience of the sacred, and refers
to escape from the realm of work, subjugation to labour, calculation, and instrumental reason
– in short,
the realm of the profane.
Following Emile Durkheim, Bataille posits a radical heterogeneity between the sacred and the profane, while
also dividing the sacred between what subsequent scholars have called
the right sacred – the powers of order, power, purity,
eternity, and life – and the left sacred, aligned with the dangerous forces of corrosion, decay, impurity,
time, and death
(see Durkheim 1965: 455–6). Bataille argues that
the divide between the sacred and the profane
arises in conjunction with the advent of labour. He relates labour to the establishment of the
subject/object dichotomy
in human consciousness, suggesting that ‘the positing of the object [or the “thing”], which is not given in
animality, occurs in the human use of tools’ (Bataille 1992a: 27).
Subordinated to the one who uses it, a tool is assigned a
utility, a telos beyond its immediate existence, and thus takes its place within a newly emergent sphere
of ‘discontinuous’ objects
that now includes oneself and others. ‘With work’, Michel Surya has written, ‘mankind discovered ends ... .
And all ends are a calculation speculating on the benefits of the future, ... all ends separate humanity
from itself’
(2002: 383). With the rise of
self-consciousness
, of oneself as a separate, distinct individual, also
comes the fear of
death and the corresponding
desire for durable, even eternal, existence. Subjugated to mortal anxiety
,
